The Bible in the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Chapter 4: Protestantism

Why Is Christian Zionism a Protestant Phenomenon?

Photo credit: Vishnu Gs, Wikimedia Commons. 

Why Christian Zionism Is Uniquely Protestant

More time and space than this needs to be dedicated to exploring why Christian Zionism generally and dispensationalism specifically arose from Protestant communities as opposed to Orthodox and Catholic communities, and why they are sustained and funded by Protestants.  Nevertheless, some comments, however introductory, are in order. 

No doubt military power contributed to the effectiveness of Protestant Christian Zionism.  Once Protestants possessed imperial power in the case of the Dutch, the British and the U.S., they  felt somewhat responsible for the Jewish community and could also do something about it.  No doubt Protestant notions of national covenants, or the sensibility that the faith of a nation should follow the denominational loyalty of its rulers, also contributed to the desire to expel Jews for being non-Christians and thus threats to the supposedly Christian character of the nations imagined.  Puritan England during the time of Cromwell was a notable exception, as they invited and welcomed Jews to England, although most jobs were not open to them and they were forced into usury-based banking; this policy had a strong element of paternalism.  And this was also accompanied by the notion of “British Israelism,” the myth that ten tribes of Israel migrated to Great Britain long ago, contributing to the British version of its own exceptionalism.

However, Protestant Zionist understandings of Israel preceded both imperial and even domestic power.  German Protestant Reformers beginning in 1526 interpreted the apostle Paul’s hope that “all Israel will be saved” to mean that the Jewish people will return to the holy land.[1]  While other Reformers such as Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli rejected this exegesis, Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza (1519 - 1605) taught it during his long tenure as a teaching faculty, Peter Martyr’s 1568 Commentary on Romans helped disseminate it to the English-speaking world, and the idea took hold among many English and American Puritans.  This notion was connected with the geopolitical aspiration that the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which had conquered Christian Constantinople in 1453 and established itself in “Europe,” would be brought low.  This relationship between Zionism and anti-Islamic geopolitics is not by happenstance.

Whatever the other motivations and factors may be, I believe this Protestant phenomenon is deeply intertwined with Protestant biblical methodologies and theologies, not just historical circumstances.  Protestantism brought about a deeper, tectonic shift on the level of theology as well.  Protestants switched from a medical view of atonement with a restorative view of divine justice in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions to a legal view of atonement with a retributive view of divine justice in the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Arminian traditions.  Although there are some important variations between them, I will collect their views together by the atonement theology that they espouse:  penal substitutionary atonement (henceforth PSA). 

Given the complexity and contested nature of these topics, my comments below are regrettably brief.  To those familiar with this theological debate, my comments might serve as little more than an overview with a new direction unexplored by others, which will need more substantiation.  I will place ample text and analysis in the footnotes.  To the uninitiated, my comments might feel overwhelming.  Yet at the risk of doing a disservice to many, I offer the following in the hope of avoiding a greater disservice to everyone.

Preliminary:  The Fallacy of False Attribution

Regarding biblical methodologies, Protestants developed varying anti-intellectual attitudes towards Scripture in order to debate Roman Catholics over biblical interpretation.  Protestants read words in the Bible and assumed they knew their meanings.  Many Protestants read the English word “slavery” in the Bible and assumed they knew what “slavery” meant; Catholics notably did not.[2]  In similar fashion, many Protestants read the word “Israel” in the Bible and assumed they knew what “Israel” meant.  Some read the English words “nations” and “brethren” in Matthew 25:31 - 46, for example, and assume that Jesus will judge, not the peoples based on how they receive Jesus’ disciples, but modern nation-states based on how they treat Jews generally[3] or specifically the State of Israel.[4]

Protestants regularly commit the fallacy of false attribution, also called the word-thing fallacy:  the mistake of thinking that just because you recognize a word, you know the thing to which that word refers without taking proper account of the potential differences between the original context and your own.  In formal logic, this is called the fallacy of false attribution:  attributing a meaning to a word that is false.  N.T. Wright points out, for example, that the meaning of the phrase, “I’m mad about my flat” depends entirely on context.  In an American context, it means, “I’m angry about my car’s flat tire.”  But in a British context, it means, “I’m happy about my apartment.”[5]  Just because we recognize a word, or phrase for that matter, doesn’t mean that we automatically know the writer’s or speaker’s meaning.  Many Protestants promoted this habit of reading under the banner of the so-called doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture.  This Protestant tendency amounts to declaring that the readers of today’s Bible translations automatically and instantaneously know what the Bible means because the original human authors of Scripture share the readers’ cultural context.  It demonstrates a habit of reading which influenced Scottish Common Sense Realism, which in turn influenced American political and religious discourse to this day,[6] including classical dispensational theology.[7]

Mistake #1: God Set Ancient Israel Up to Be Punished

PSA had at least three major effects on Protestants that contribute to Protestant Zionism:  one emotional, another political, the last anthropological.  I address the emotional impact first.  Emotionally, I find it understandable for Protestants who are influenced by Martin Luther and John Calvin to feel unease, pity, and even guilt and anguish for the Jewish community.  Why is this?  Because they feel uneasy that God, in their view, inflicted so much of His retributive justice on ancient Israel, because He used them as a demonstration that people break His laws, and might be doing that today to some degree. 

In the PSA framework, God used ancient Israel as a long case study of humanity’s lawbreaking and imperfection.  In his Institutes, in a chapter devoted to the topic, Calvin enumerated five differences between the Old and New Testaments:  (1) the Old Testament portrayed in terrestrial terms what the New Testament presents as a celestial inheritance;[8] (2) the terrestrial aspect of the Old Testament presented figures and analogies whereas the New presents the truth;[9] (3) the Old Testament contained the commands and the consequences for breaking those commands, without giving the power to live out the commands, and looked ahead to the mercy of the New and “borrowed from” it;[10] and (4) the Old Testament portrayed a covenant of bondage to fear whereas the New describes a covenant of liberty from sin and fear;[11] and (5) the Old Testament limited God’s covenant to the Jewish nation whereas the New offered it to the gentiles along with Jews.[12] 

Calvin, in his legal-penal framework, shown especially in his third and fourth points, considered the Sinai covenant not in terms of God causing an improvement in the quality of human life in Israel but only in relation to perfection where God’s only salient finding is that Israel failed.  Calvin even said that, to the extent that God was merciful in the Old Testament to Israel, He “borrowed from” the New. 

For example, the law contains frequent promises of mercy; but as they are borrowed from another dispensation, they are not considered as part of the law, when the mere nature of the law is the subject of discussion.  All that they attribute to it is, that it enjoins what is right, and prohibits crimes; that it proclaims a reward for the followers of righteousness; but that it neither changes nor corrects the depravity of heart which is natural to all men.[13]

The Old Testament of the Lord was that which was delivered to the Jews, involved in a shadowy and inefficaciousobservance of ceremonies.”[14] 

In Calvin’s reading, if God gave the Jews commandments without the power to live them out, then for over a millennium of biblical history, God demonstrated that He was more than eager and willing to pour His retributive justice upon them. 

Therefore, as the favors of God were more conspicuous in earthly things, so also were his punishments… during that period, in which he gave the Israelites his covenant involved in some degree of obscurity, he intended to signify and prefigure the grace of future and eternal felicity by terrestrial blessings, and the grievousness of spiritual death by corporal punishments.[15]

In fact, in this retributive-legal paradigm, God used ancient Israel to forecast what He will fully do in hell to satisfy, or just as properly, never satisfy, His infinite retributive justice.[16]  So, if Jesus was a penal substitute, then lawbreaking Israel was God’s whipping post:  an initial foundational experience of punishment; a bitter appetizer to the more bitter meal Jesus had to eat; a warning to all of the threat of remaining retribution in hell; a finite demonstration of human pain for pain’s own sake; a premonition of ultimate doom.

If, on top of that, Protestants fully embrace Augustine’s doctrines of total depravity and double predestination, as Luther and Calvin themselves did, then they deepen the intellectual and emotional problem.  They must ascribe Jewish unbelief directly to God.  Why did/do most Jews not come to Christ?  Because, so the answer goes, God did not take the initiative to regenerate their hearts and grant them saving faith in Christ.  The implications for Jewish unbelief are suddenly quite staggering and redound directly onto the will and character of God.  God set ancient Israel up to fail and be punished. Why then did God not send Jesus much sooner?  Why not right after the fall?  The more we appreciate how long God waited to send Jesus, the more we have to reckon with Jewish suffering during that long period.  Is there an answer that the Lutheran and Reformed traditions can offer, influenced as they are by Augustine?  Or is the matter hopelessly inscrutable?

The thought of trying to evangelize Jewish people causes very mixed feelings.  A Jewish person today asks a Christian, “In your view, why did God need Israel?”  How can a PSA advocate respond?  Note that this emotional tension comes from within the attempt to be faithful to Jesus.  Paul instructs us to bless those who curse us, even adding, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:14 - 15).  How, then, can Christians weep with Jews?  And, Jesus himself told us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43 - 48; Luke 6:27 - 36), which does not by itself mean that Jewish people are the enemies of Christians in every sense, but rather that Christians must wonder whether God Himself loves non-Christians.  Does God tell Christians to do things that He Himself does not?

Going further, when Protestants committed to these theological points learn about the suffering of the Jews because of the Nazis, and how far back Christian-inspired anti-Semitism goes in Europe, they become unsure how much of that, too, to attribute to God Himself.  Nor can they easily stabilize their conflicting perceptions of God’s character. 

The very recent theological proposal of dispensationalism then becomes very attractive emotionally.  Dispensationalism was articulated by the 19th century British Brethren preacher John Nelson Darby (1800 - 1882) and popularized in the U.S. by the American evangelist Dwight L. Moody (1837 - 1899) and the Scofield Study Bible (1909, 1917).[17]  Dispensationalism proposes that Christians do not need to evangelize Jews because God will sort out His own relationship with Israel in a different modality than the church.  The core premise dispensationalism offers is that Israel and the church are expressions of two different covenants, or dispensations, and not one covenant.  By saying this, dispensationalism relieves Christians of the emotional burden of having to directly answer Jewish questions about theodicy and theology.  The emotional tension that Protestants feel towards the Jewish community and/or even God can then be released by supporting the State of Israel as the true homeland for the Jews as the next step towards Armageddon and the second coming of Jesus.  But this lacks integrity, as I argued in the previous chapter.

Irenaeus on Ancient Israel:  An Admirable Medical Focus Group, or Clinic

By contrast, the early Christians had a different understanding of God’s commandments and recognized that God made real moral and spiritual achievements with Israel prior to Jesus.  In the second century, the most important Christian writer, Irenaeus of Lyons, says that while Adam and Eve fell into sin, God partnered with Abraham and thereby “accustomed” man to follow His Word.[18]  Because humanity had become “accustomed” to the bonds of sin, God gave the law to Israel,[19] and God’s partnership with Israel was a work of “accustoming humanity to salvation”[20] and “accustoming man to bear His Spirit.”[21]  In and through Israel, says Irenaeus, humans made real moral progress with God, and God made real spiritual progress with humans in restoring and saving human nature. 

Notably, Irenaeus also understood Jesus to have accomplished a medical substitutionary atonement (henceforth MSA), not a penal substitutionary one.  In academic circles, Irenaeus’ view of atonement is typically called “recapitulation.”  That term is drawn from the word anakephalaiōsasthai, the bringing together or re-heading up, found in Ephesians 1:10.  But it is rooted in the whole of Jesus’ incarnation, human life, death, and resurrection taken in narrative totality with Adam and Eve, Israel, and David.  Irenaeus perceived that the incarnate Son of God, in becoming human, became “man, who had sin in himself.”[22]  Jesus never succumbed to temptation, however.  Instead, Jesus lived a life of utter faithfulness to God the Father, which had the effect of defeating and then cleansing Jesus’ own human nature of sin-sickness.  Irenaeus says:

For it behooved Him who was to destroy sin, and redeem man under the power of death, that He should Himself be made that very same thing which he was, that is, man; who had been drawn by sin into bondage, but was held by death, so that sin should be destroyed by man, and man should go forth from death. For as by the disobedience of the one man who was originally moulded from virgin soil, the many were made sinners, and forfeited life; so was it necessary that, by the obedience of one man, who was originally born from a virgin, many should be justified and receive salvation… What He did appear, that He also was: God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man...[23]

Salvation was understood first and foremost as Jesus’ own salvation of true humanness from the sin-sickness within human nature.  The sin-sickness from the fall produces in us a moral weakness, a vulnerability to influence by Satan and the demons, and the necessity of exile from the garden, resulting in mortality.  More on this last point below.  Jesus was victor, not victim.  He was the active agent of God’s restorative justice, not the passive receiver of God’s retributive justice.  He was a medical, not penal, substitute.  For he substituted his active faithfulness in for our active unfaithfulness, to restore human nature in himself and so do what we could not do, so he could do in us what he did in himself, as we participate in him by the Spirit. 

Irenaeus on Jewish Exile and Divine Restorative Justice

Irenaeus also recognized that the Jewish community’s theological exile and diaspora are important from a Christian ethics perspective.  Following Paul’s logic in Romans 4, Irenaeus said that Abraham was the forerunner of both communities, but adds the ethical posture of pilgrimage characteristic of Hebrews:  “that he might be the father of all who follow the Word of God, and who sustain a life of pilgrimage in this world, that is, of those who from among the circumcision and of those from among the uncircumcision are faithful.”[24]  As I mentioned in the last chapter, Augustine and other Christian leaders from the fourth century onward made the “imperial Christendom” mistake of saying that “Jews are in exile but we Christians are not.”  Irenaeus attests to an earlier, biblically faithful view of saying that “Jews are in exile because we are all in exile.”  Irenaeus implies a posture of pilgrimage with an ethic of sharing and hospitality, one in which Christ Jesus as pilgrim perfected the life of Abraham as pilgrim.

By contrast, Justin Martyr (c.100 - c.165), a Christian apologist and independent teacher in Rome, also from the second century, differed with Irenaeus.  Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew demonstrates a different, and quite spiteful, way of interpreting Judaism.  Justin made several puzzling mistakes about Jewish history and theology, which is concerning given that this was his main subject matter in the Dialogue with Trypho.[25]  On outward circumcision and other Jewish laws, Justin not only misses the "accustoming humanity to bear God's word and Spirit" that Irenaeus taught, he says that it only served to make a social difference and mark the Jews off for suffering at Gentile hands:

For circumcision...which is from Abraham, was given for a sign: that you may be separated from other nations, and from us [Christians] and that you alone may suffer that which you justly suffer; and that your land be desolate, and your cities burned with fire... and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem.[26]

Possibly, Justin believed recent Jewish defeats served as a rhetorical insult, or spoke this way as a shorthand for the long form version that Jewish militancy as the idolatrous alternative to belief in Jesus as Messiah, to which the Roman authorities could only respond with military force in kind.  However, as written, Justin also believed he could interpret Jewish suffering theologically.  He quoted Leviticus 26:40 - 41 immediately before this passage, attributing these events to God’s causal agency.  By doing this, Justin conveyed the ideas that Jews are in exile while gentiles and/or Christians are not, and that the Jewish exile began with the Romans, not the Babylonians centuries ago.  Indeed, “these things,” Justin said, have befallen Trypho and Jewry not simply because they have fomented rebellions and uprisings in an effort to force the prophecies of God’s kingdom into being on the military messianic interpretation, but directly because “you have slain the Just One,” Jesus.  

And in what events did Justin claim to perceive God’s hand?  Justin goes decades beyond the scope of Jesus' warnings about Roman action in response to Jewish militancy and Irenaeus’ historical commentary; he does not stop at 66 - 70, in the Roman-Jewish War, when Jewish leaders led a revolt to liberate Jerusalem from the Romans and in response, the Roman general Titus Vespasian leveled the temple and the city.  Justin almost certainly included the Jewish uprisings in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Egypt from 115 - 117 where the Roman general Lucius Quietus put down the rebellions, pursued the leaders to Judea, captured them, and put them to death; these later became collectively known as the Kitos War.  Justin certainly did refer to the Bar-Kochba rebellion at Masada in 132 - 135 when the Roman Empire, in response, besieged Masada for several years; the Jewish holdouts died by suicide before the Romans could ascend their rampart and invade the fortress.  By saying, "not one of you may go up to Jerusalem," Justin agrees with Emperor Hadrian’s decree in 135 forbidding Jews to enter Jerusalem on pain of death.  Justin’s agreement is indicated when he said to Trypho that he and Jewry “suffer that which you justly suffer” by the hand of God post-70.  Justin infers that God’s judgment can be seen in all of the ongoing Jewish experience of suffering.  Jerusalem is no longer the city of the Jews, according to Justin.  It must either be permanently rubble or renamed something else and occupied by non-Jews.

Irenaeus reasoned more carefully and precisely than Justin Martyr.  The bishop of Lyons did say that the Jews became “the slayers of their Lord” or “the slayers of the Lord,”[27] and that Jerusalem’s time as the site of the temple and the seat of the Davidic kings had come to an end.  He said Jerusalem had brought forth spiritual fruit in Israel and “throughout the world,” which God intended.[28]  But unlike Justin Martyr, Irenaeus stopped trying to read the hand of God in Jewish history at the year 70, at God’s judgment on Jerusalem and especially its temple.  He seemed to recognize that Jesus’ own words on the matter had a very precise scope, and were fulfilled within one generation, as Jesus had said (Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32).  Unlike Justin, Irenaeus did not try to discern God’s actions in the Kitos War of 115 - 117 or the Bar-Kochba rebellion in 132 - 135.  Irenaeus did this as a biblical theologian limiting himself to God’s own words from Scripture and Jesus’ own teaching; he reasons that the Sinai covenant itself, which included Jerusalem, was always temporary, though it did bear fruit for God in a preliminary and vital way.[29]

Moreover, Irenaeus said Jerusalem’s time was fulfilled while maintaining an extended parallel between God’s first exodus of Israel out from Pharaoh’s hostility, and His second exodus of Jesus out from Jewish hostility.[30]  By holding this parallel before his readers, Irenaeus held in symmetry what the apostle Paul did in Romans 9:  On the one hand, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart leading to a salvation experience for Israel and, on the other hand, the hardening of Jewish leaders’ hearts leading to a salvation experience for both Jew and gentile.  Irenaeus also paralleled the two events with regards to material wealth; he defended against a gnostic accusation that material goods should be unimportant:  When God delivered Israel out of Egypt, Israel spoiled the Egyptians of many goods; thus, as God delivers the church out of the nations, the church spoils the nations of much unrighteous mammon.  Not only does he indicate that the church is drawn out from the nations and not to be collapsed back into any particular nation, Irenaeus maintains the continuity of the biblical story in this parallel:  Just as God brought Israel out into a wilderness pilgrimage, God brings the church into a wilderness pilgrimage as well. 

In fact, in this context, Irenaeus said that a certain unnamed presbyter (elder) who taught him and other Christians told them not to judge Jewish sins of the past. 

When recounting certain matters of this kind respecting them of old time, the presbyter [before mentioned] was in the habit of instructing us, and saying: With respect to those misdeeds for which the Scriptures themselves blame the patriarchs and prophets, we ought not to inveigh against them, nor become like Ham, who ridiculed the shame of his father, and so fell under a curse; but we should [rather] give thanks to God in their behalf, inasmuch as their sins have been forgiven them through the advent of our Lord; for he said that they gave thanks [for us], and gloried in our salvation.[31]

Importantly, Irenaeus does not associate the Jewish exile and diaspora with the rejection of Jesus.  Instead, he says the reverse, and appropriately so.  Jesus in his first advent

was led as a sheep to the slaughter [Isaiah 53:7], and by the stretching forth of His hands destroyed Amalek [Exodus 17:11], while He gathered from the ends of the earth into His Father's fold the children who were scattered abroad [Isaiah 11:12; Psalm 107; John 7:35; etc.], and remembered His own dead ones who had formerly fallen asleep [1 Peter 4:6], and came down to them that He might deliver them.[32] 

This sequencing is vitally important.  Jewish exile was not God’s retributive response to Jewish rejection of Jesus.  Quite the opposite:  Jewish exile came long before Jesus, and God’s sending of Jesus was His response to Jewish exile to regather them in Jesus’ name.  God the good-physician-turned-good-patient was pursuing the members of the former medical focus group “scattered abroad,” to make sure they heard about the cure.  This is why the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem wondered of Jesus, “Will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles, and teach the Gentiles?” (John 7:35) James addressed Jews who were “scattered abroad” (James 1:1); Peter, those “scattered throughout” Asia Minor (1 Peter 1:1).  The apostolic council in Jerusalem said, “ in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him” (Acts 15:21). 

Some people in conversation have disagreed with my argument on the grounds that they believe the Babylonian Exile of 586 BCE is a different exile from the Roman response to Jewish military uprisings in 70 and 135 CE.  The argument focuses on population demographics.  Supposedly, the deportation to Babylon and elsewhere pales in comparison to the Roman treatment.  Thus, in their view, there are multiple Jewish exilic experiences.  From the standpoint of biblical theology, however, there is a singular Jewish exile constituted not simply by the movement of peoples but the loss of political sovereignty by the Davidic kings and the departure of God’s shekinah glory from the temple.  By the time of Jesus, not only were there substantial synagogue communities established outside the land, but the House of David still did not have political sovereignty and God’s shekinah did not come to reoccupy the Jerusalem temple.  This meant that the singular Jewish exile was still in effect.

For Irenaeus, there was a singular Jewish exile that began with Babylon 586 BCE, prior to Jesus, which reflected the exile of all humanity from the garden of Eden, and participated in it.  There were not multiple exiles.  So the Roman destruction of Jerusalem retold Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem; it may have been different in degree but not in kind.  Irenaeus also addresses the question of persistent Jewish unbelief.  Will collective Jewish guilt  about rejecting Jesus haunt and pursue them, resulting in more political persecution?  Not for Irenaeus.  If Jews persist in rejecting Jesus, Irenaeus says, they will simply share the common eternal destiny of gentiles who reject Jesus.[33]  But Irenaeus does not reason out from Jewish history after 70 that God’s hand was at work against the Jewish people or that God was uniquely and historically against them on account of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Once again, Justin Martyr, Augustine, and others reversed the sequence.  But Irenaeus understood the matter correctly; he saw Jesus as God’s restorative response to Jewish exile and humanity’s exile, and not the other way round:  Jewish exile was not God’s retributive response to Jesus’ crucifixion.

Irenaeus’ recollection of the apostles’ experience of mission is important because he honors Jews.  He read the apostle Paul’s statement, “I labored more than them all” in 1 Corinthians 15:10 as demonstrating categorically that the apostles “who preached among the Gentiles underwent greater labour” than the apostles who preached among the Jews. Irenaeus said that the mission to the Jews was easier than that to the gentiles, as he said that the apostles to the Jews were “assisted by the Scriptures” whereas those who ministered to the gentiles could not appeal to the Scriptures as an authority.  Irenaeus observed the “pharisaical law” as continuous with what Jesus called “the traditions of the elders” (Matthew 15:1 - 20; Mark 7:1 - 23), and he criticized it as deviating from the true purpose of the Law of Moses, which was to direct people to Jesus’ own healing and transformation of the human heart.[34]  But Irenaeus also said that the Jews were in the practice of regular synagogue readings of Scripture, and said with appreciation:  They “who were in the habit of hearing Moses and the prophets, did also readily receive the First-begotten of the dead, and the Prince of the life of God, — Him who, by the spreading forth of hands, did destroy Amalek, and vivify man from the wound of the serpent.”  Irenaeus thinks of prophetic passages about the Messiah but also makes typological connections to the healing of human nature from the ancient wound of the fall:  Moses stretched out his hands against Amalek; Jesus did the same on the cross as he stretched out his hands against the “wound of the serpent”[35] to defeat what the Talmudic tradition itself sees as “the Amalek within.”

The Early Church on Ancient Israel:  The Admirable Medical Focus Group, or Clinic

The medical, restorative view of God, divine commandments, Israel’s experience of God, and Jesus’ work is widespread in early Christianity.  Gregory of Nazianzus, president of the Second Ecumenical Council and one of the three holy hierarchs in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, says God gave commandments to Israel as the modern day equivalent of a doctor prescribing a demanding health regimen to a sick patient.  God helped Israel cultivate some goodness or virtue to show that the law was for our diagnosis and cure, though ultimately we needed Christ to come, and heal and cleanse us.[36]  Macarius of Egypt, a monastic preacher of the Syriac and Greek churches, says that God sent Moses to bestow on Israel a “partial cure” for sin; and that God’s appearances and sanctuary presence had a healing, cleansing effect on Israel.[37]  And Cyril of Alexandria, revered in the Greek, Coptic, and Syriac churches, says:

After Moses, Prophets were sent to cure Israel: but in their healing office they lamented that they were not able to overcome the disease... The wounds of man’s nature pass our healing... The evil is irretrievable by us, and needs thee to retrieve it. The Lord heard the prayer of the Prophets. The Father disregarded not the perishing of our race; He sent forth His Son, the Lord from heaven, as healer..."[38] 

Patristic leaders understood Israel as partially successful at partnering with God to diagnose the ubiquitous sin-sickness, resist it, document it, and hope for God’s cure.  They understood hell in medical terms, too:  as a possible condition where humans become so addicted to sin that they desire something other than God and interpret Jesus’ offer of healing as torment.[39]  An alternate expression in relation to divine truth and human perception was that hell is where humans damage their eyes so profoundly that the divine light God wants to shine on them becomes torment.[40] 

How did the early Christians understand God’s disciplinary acts in Scripture towards ancient Israel and gentile enemies like Noah’s contemporaries, the Egyptians, and the Canaanites?  Also restoratively.  As I mentioned in the previous chapter about God defending Israel from gentile enemies, all pre-Reformation Christians taught that all the human beings who died before Jesus died descended to Sheol (in Hebrew) or Hades (in Greek) in what we today might compare to a coma.  This teaching on the dead was coupled with the teaching that Jesus, when he died, descended to the dead and presented himself to them, giving them a genuine opportunity to choose him (1 Peter 4:6; 3:18 - 20).  The Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed contain the phrase “he descended to the dead” with this meaning.  Christian tradition said this uniformly for 1500 years.[41] 

Because Jesus presented himself to all the dead with his offer to restore their human nature out of the overflow of his resurrection, it is appropriate to maintain that God’s justice towards each person was restorative, not retributive.  Not just the gentile enemies of Israel from without but also defectors from within, went into this coma.  The relevant question was not whether people died by “natural causes” or special action of God, but simply what death meant for anyone and everyone.  For death did not mean that God was consigning people to hell.  Even Moses said that God was angry with him and was taking his life by special action (Deuteronomy 4:21 - 22; cf. Numbers 20:1 - 13), but Moses was not consigned to hell.  In fact, Moses reappeared when Jesus summoned him to the top of Mount Tabor when he was transfigured (Matthew 17:3; Mark 9:4; Luke 9:30).  Thus, death was akin to a coma. 

The earliest Christians even perceived human mortality and death categorically, regardless of circumstance, as one step in God’s restorative justice.  Irenaeus of Lyons, Methodius of Olympus, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ambrose of Milan, and Maximus the Confessor note that God exiled humans from the garden, not because God was acting out of a desire for retribution or to avenge his offended authority, but because He was forced to do so by Adam and Eve.[42]  Adam and Eve corrupted human nature and infected it with the sin-sickness, causing for us, their descendants, what the Orthodox call ancestral sin.[43]  God did not want humans to eat from the tree of life while in a corrupted state, which would make human sin and evil immortal along with our bodies.  Thus, God was forced to close the garden of Eden to us because He was motivated by love for us.  God knew He would have to correct and complete human nature in Jesus on our behalf.  So death might be the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26), but death was not the first enemy.  Exile and death served one constructive purpose.

Also, the early Christians understood the theme of human being, human becoming that is also vitally important in Scripture.  We are becoming something based on our desires and determination.  We see this in creation, God invited Adam and Eve not to remain static but to become invested with even more of His life via the tree of life.  In the fall, Adam and Eve showed that they could damage human nature, and Cain showed that we can damage our own human nature further and alienate ourselves further from the land and life (Genesis 4:11).  In the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, perhaps Moses with shining face (Exodus 34) illustrates how far a person could go positively.  Perhaps Pharaoh with hardened heart illustrates how far a person could go negatively. 

If we put those themes together, we even find that when God took human life by special action, He was expressing part of His restorative justice to each person, not just to humanity in the abstract.  When people attacked Noah and his family, or the Israelites later, or rejected God’s purpose for Israel from within Israel, they rejected God such that they hardened their hearts to a dangerous degree.  So, when God put them into a coma ward of sorts via physical mortality until Jesus woke them up much later, God was preserving their last possible choice.  Thus, God was never instrumentalizing people, whether Israel, their internal defectors, or their gentile enemies.  Through and through, God was motivated by a desire to love and restore down to the individual level.

Thus, the early Christian foundation led to Orthodox and Catholic theology being saturated with a medical, restorative understanding of God and the very meaning of salvation offered to all humans as a participation in Christ via divine-human partnership.  The early Christians honored ancient Israel for its role as a medical focus group in a spiritual register into which Jesus was born and from whom he learned and inherited his vocation.  The basic idea was that while Jesus did what Israel could not, at least Israel tried what the gentiles would not.  God laid the groundwork for Jesus in ancient Israel where He, as Irenaeus said, “accustomed man” to bear His word and Spirit.

Correspondingly, Christian leaders in the second and third centuries demonstrated tension with but also a curious affinity for synagogue Judaism, though certainly not for theological reasons alone.  Sociologist Rodney Stark has argued based on additional analysis of social networks that, contrary to some popular belief, church and synagogue existed in close relationship for centuries, with significant numbers of Jews becoming Christians.[44]  Polycarp of Smyrna (69 - 155) and Irenaeus of Lyons (130 - 202) both visited Rome and successfully defended the Christian practice in Asia Minor of celebrating Easter on the Jewish lunar calendar in connection with the Jewish Passover, not the Roman Julian calendar.  This “Quartodeciman view,” also held by the Jewish-born Christian bishop Melito of Sardis (d.180), shows that the Christians of Asia Minor had a closer connection to the Jewish synagogue community, broadly, and Hebraic concerns, than did Christians in Rome.  It also shows that the church at this time broadly understood that they could, and even should, accommodate different practices from both Jewish and gentile backgrounds when appropriate (Romans 14:1 - 15:13).  Irenaeus deploys the trope of “Amalek” multiple times, but for the purpose of indicating “the Amalek within.”  By doing things like this, Irenaeus suggests that he was familiar with the Jewish mind as it developed the post-biblical Talmudic tradition.

In Dura-Europos in Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates River, a Jewish synagogue and Christian church building stood side by side for some time until the city was abandoned in 256.  In Spain circa 306, the rather severe Council of Elvira forbade Christians from marrying pagans (canon 15) and Jews (canon 16), getting Jewish blessings on their fields (canon 49), and eating with Jews (canon 50).  This latter point reflects both faithfulness to Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 7 that Christians should marry Christians when a voluntary choice is involved, and also the possibility that both communities were large enough and close enough to coexist and have close relations.  It may also reflect the possibility that many Christians in Spain came from Jewish backgrounds.  The Jewish Encyclopedia entry on Church Councils notes that “the spirit of intolerance… remained characteristic of the Spanish Church.”[45]  Even John Chrysostom’s eight controversial sermons against Judaism, which he gave while a priest in Syrian Antioch (386 - 387) prior to becoming archbishop of Constantinople until his death in 407, can be understood as standing against not Jews per se, but Christians who were Judaizing because of the presence of a large and fairly impressive Jewish community.[46]  While his rhetoric was disturbingly scathing and slanderous of the synagogue, by the standards of rhetoric of late antiquity, it was not so unusual, and presumes that Jews and Christians had regular exchanges and even close relations.[47]

Unfortunately, Augustine of Hippo’s view about Jewish exile and divine justice, which was the opposite of Irenaeus’, became the dominant view of European Christendom, as I described in the previous chapter.  While the early Christians made other mistakes vis-a-vis the Jews for multiple reasons, most of these mistakes have been explored by others[48]and were not driven by the core concerns of Christology and atonement per se, the theology from which the Protestant Reformers largely departed.

The Protestant Theory of Divine Retributive Justice

Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Arminius, along with the magisterial Protestant traditions which followed after them, altered the definition of God’s justice and righteousness and the very meaning of salvation.  They weakened the interpretive connections between New Testament Greek and Old Testament Hebrew.  Alister McGrath, in the fourth edition of his unparalleled study of the history of the doctrine of justification, shows that the Reformers were unduly influenced by the Latin concept of “merit” or “desert,” as in what an individual person deserves based on how he or she acted.  The Reformers disconnected Paul’s use of the Greek word dikaiosyne, translated into English as “righteousness” in the critical passage Romans 3:21 - 26, from the underlying Hebrew words and concepts for righteousness (sedeq) and justice-judgment (mishpat) found in the Hebrew Old Testament, including through the mediating translation of the Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew text into the Greek Septuagint.[49]  The Hebrew Bible uses the terms “righteousness” and “justice” to denote uplifting the poor and vulnerable and defending them from predation, along with restoring physical harm done (Exodus 21:18 - 19; 22:1 - 14) and by implication the relational qualities of communion and trust, not simply rewarding and punishing people for their individual actions, which is what the Latin concept of “merit” or “desert” emphasize.  

PSA advocates make a similar mistake with regards to the legal or legal-sounding language of Scripture.  What about “forgiveness of sins”?  Is “forgiveness of sin” not a legal matter akin to a pardon from a judge or lawgiver?  No, because the original sense of the Greek word aphesin, which is rendered “forgiveness” in English, means remission or sending away:  In other words, God sends our sins away, as our sins are sent away and remitted like debts might be sent away from a person, or go into remission like symptoms of a disease are sent away from a person, with the added valence that the disease itself is sent away, not just its symptoms.  The concept underlying the term aphesin tōn paraptōmatōn (Ephesians 1:7; Colossians 1:14) is not simply a legal pardon in the mind of God the Father but an actual separation wrought by God the Son by the Holy Spirit between the human person and sins on the grounds that Jesus in his physical body wrought an utter separation between his human nature and sin. 

Conceptually, then, the “remission of sins” is another way of saying “circumcision of the heart,” but with the opposite direct object.  A spiritual separation is wrought like surgery between the human person and the corruption of sin within human nature.  “Circumcision of the heart,” as explained earlier, was a biblical image explaining what obedience to the Sinai covenant would accomplish within the human nature of the Jewish people (Deuteronomy 10:16; 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4).  The idea is not legal but medical-ontological, and rests not on God merely imputing this status onto the person like the Father seeing the person through Christ as through a certain lens, but on the believer’s actual ongoing participation in Christ - shown for instance in Paul’s phrase, “if you continue in the faith” in Colossians 1:23.  In any case, as Irenaeus and others taught, Israel’s experience of salvation was partial, and Jesus’ experience was full.  There is a stronger sense of continuity between what ancient Israel tried, failed to completely do, but still longed for, and what Jesus did and now provides.  Israel was the clinic; Jesus is the cure.  To receive the latter is to appreciate the former. 

The Protestant Reformers committed the false attribution fallacy.  The net effect was that the Reformers assumed that divine justice and righteousness rest on the concept of retribution, not restoration of the original relational order and condition that God desires.  Thus, PSA advocates interpreted divine justice as meritocratic-retributive and not restorative, with very significant consequences.

The emotional impact of the theology is important to name, though unfortunately time and space prevent me from going into depth.  In the view of most Protestants, God gave commandments not for our good, as a medical doctor prescribes a health regimen, but for His own good, as a king decrees laws measuring loyal behavior and poised to punish misbehavior.  They interpreted human beings not as a divine-human partnership in the cultivation of desires but as a collection of deeds.  They understood hell not as a medical condition imposed by one’s own cultivated desires resulting in addiction and delusion but instead a penal condition imposed by God’s desires for our torture and agony.  They shifted their definition of salvation - from God saving us from our sin-sickness, to God saving us from His own retributive justice, or simply Himself.  That is, instead of Jesus substituting his whole active faithfulness for Israel’s partial faithfulness under the Sinai covenant, to heal human nature or “circumcise the heart” of “the flesh of sin,” Jesus instead became the passive receiver of divine retributive justice on the cross so God could satisfy His own retributive wrath.  Only by having no retributive wrath leftover for us could God extend forgiveness to humans.  In effect, for many Protestants, God does not send away our sins from us in the classical Greek understanding of aphesin; He sent away His wrath against our sins.  The difference is quite important.  This is but a sampling of shifts related to changing one's understanding of Jesus’ work of atonement from a medical substitution to a penal substitution. 

John Calvin changed the meaning of Jesus’ descent to the dead, which impacted how Christians would think of all who died before Jesus died, but especially the ancient Israelites.  While making his case for his theory of penal substitutionary atonement, Calvin said that Jesus’ descent to the dead was not an offering of salvation to the dead but instead a moment on the cross when his human soul was alive but experienced torment as if he had descended into the fires of divine torment in hell.  Calvin, in what might be considered an early act of demythologization, argued that this event should not be understood as having taken place on Holy Saturday, but while Jesus was alive on the cross on Friday and when he quoted Psalm 22:1, which completely changed the meanings of both Psalm 22 and the descent.[50]  Calvin argued that the earliest Christians uniformly misunderstood the descent.  Although this interpretation is by no means what everyone in the Reformed tradition holds,[51] Calvin’s position has its adherents.  In 1991, Calvinist theologian Wayne A. Grudem argued that Christians should remove the phrase altogether from the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed;[52] R.C. Sproul denied that we can know the meaning of 1 Peter 3 and 4.[53]  This interpretation would only serve to enhance the impression that God’s justice is retributive, at the expense of most of those who died before Jesus died, which might be the majority of the ancient Israelites.  This trajectory leads some Protestant interpreters of 1 Peter today to believe that Jesus’ descent to the dead was separable from the crucifixion per se, following it, but not an offer of salvation; it was, they argue, an act of divine mockery aimed at the damned humans and/or damned angelic spirits.[54]  Such views would give the impression that God in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament had no further interaction with people.  Readers are left with the impression that if they died while displeasing God in any way, God consigned them immediately to a punitive hell.

Protestants on Ancient Israel’s Experience of God’s Retributive Justice

Protestants who held to PSA, then, shifted the Christian understanding of ancient Israel from a partially successful medical focus group to a group of lawbreakers deserving of nothing but divine retributive justice and wrath.  While it is true that, in Christian thought generally, Jewish rebelliousness towards God represented all humanity’s rebelliousness, there was in the Protestant psyche a deeper, unavoidable anxiety about God’s specific work with ancient Israel:  God set Israel up to fail and get punished.  The more Protestants wanted to magnify the meaning of Jesus’ death, the more they characterized the Jews as rebellious, guilty lawbreakers who nevertheless tried to “earn their salvation” or “merit God’s favor.”  Even when they did “good works,” their motives were regarded as, or suspected to be, quite selfish.  In modern times, for example, Timothy Keller, former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, regularly called upon people to repent of their good deeds because of the virtually unavoidable pitfall of pride.  From the time Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg door, Protestants inferred that Judaism most often produced people like the Pharisees who opposed Jesus, or the Judaizers who opposed Paul. 

Protestants appropriated Paul’s critique of “works of the law” in Galatians, Romans, and Philippians as a stand-in for “human effort in general.”  This popular misunderstanding has had to be corrected over and over; for instance, American evangelical, philosopher, and spiritual formation writer Dallas Willard said, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but to earning.  Effort is action.  Earning is attitude.”[55]  Nevertheless, despite admonitions like Willard’s, the more common Protestant misunderstanding about “human works” served as the negative backdrop to God’s legal forgiveness and pardon found in the general Protestant view of “justification by faith alone,” which rested on the “finished work of Christ” in absorbing the sufficient amount of divine retributive justice on the cross so that nothing but divine forgiveness remained, regardless of one’s deeds or efforts.  The more Protestants believed they understood about human depravity and our self-promotion and our deservingness of God’s retributive justice, the louder these conclusions reverberated logically against God’s own work with ancient Israel.  Why did God make that time period last for so long?  The more that Protestants in their legal-retributive paradigm argued that humanity needs legal pardon from Jesus, the more they had trouble explaining why God took so long with ancient Israel and made them endure so much.

To the extent that Protestants focused on emotions in the framework of penal substitutionary atonement, they focused on generating survival emotions:  guilt and anxiety about divine retributive justice on the one hand, which drive us to Christ for legal pardon and forgiveness; relief for legal pardon and gratitude for survival on the other hand, which drive us back to God’s moral commandments to try to do them.  The Christian’s emotional foundation involved Christ in his work of penal substitutionary atonement.  This emotional experience of Christ was necessarily separated from, and elevated over, Christ in his capacity as embodied exemplar and in that sense, normative human, teacher, lawgiver, and king.  It is a well known trope in the Anglo-American evangelical world that preachers and “serious” Christians privilege Romans and Galatians because these letters contain the apostle’s lengthiest discussions of “justification by faith,” which Protestants believe rests upon penal substitution; they believe Romans and Galatians distill “the gospel” in purest form.  This, in spite of the fact that Ephesians should be considered the “center” of Paul’s thought because it was not addressed to any particular problem, and the word justification is not even mentioned. 

Emotionally, gentile Protestants could only accumulate a sense of unease about Jews theologically - anger and guilt being among the most commonly recognized emotions.  Some, like Martin Luther, felt anger that the Jews continue to reject Jesus.  But anger is just one color in a tapestry of emotions.  Others, more sympathetic, feel guilt over how they think God treated the Jews.  There is a nagging wonder or anxiety that God tricked the Jewish people into trying to earn His favor.  At times, the holy land and Israel’s geopolitical prominence are perceived as consolation prizes or carrots given to the Jews to accept God’s challenge and endure God’s punishment.  Perhaps God, in this paradigm, baited the ancient Jewish people into partnership by promising them physical, external promises of land, fruitfulness, children, and geopolitical supremacy.  It is almost as if, on account of their suffering, the Jewish people “deserve” a triumphant moment in the sun or a quiet retirement:  a geopolitical version of God’s kingdom under Jesus where Israel is finally triumphant over the gentile nations, for the thousand year period referenced in Revelation 20.  I suspect, though, that this guilt and anger are unresolved and unresolvable in the PSA framework, and exerts some emotional, even subconscious, motivation for Protestants believing some form of Christian Zionism, even without the literal interpretation of the millennium of Revelation 20.  Perhaps Protestants feel like both the anger and the guilt might be resolved and relieved if Jesus resolves his longstanding promise to Israel.  And thus, Protestant Christian Zionism:  God has yet to deliver on His promises to the Jewish people. 

PSA made dispensationalism emotionally palatable for other reasons layered on top of the question of how to regard Judaism and Jews in the plan of God.  Protestants came to prefer the Epistles over the Gospels because the Epistles seemed to foreground the atonement and work out the practical commandments for Christian life from there.  By contrast, the Gospels narrated the facts, of course, but the death and resurrection of Jesus came last, and in the PSA-retributive justice framework, Jesus’ role as normative human, teacher, lawgiver, and king put psychological and emotional pressure to move quickly to the atonement.  This is worth pointing out because it bears a curious resemblance to dispensationalism.  Although some dispensationalists did revise their arguments later, throughout most of the twentieth century, the classical dispensationalists like C.I. Scofield, James F. Rand, and William L. Pettingill argued that the earthly ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus, as well as their teaching, were an invitation to ancient Israel but not normative for Christians because God pivoted hard from Israel to the church.  They taught that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was not even normative for Christians.[56]  What PSA produced in people emotionally, dispensationalism formalized theologically.

Mistake #2:  The Reformed Redeployment of Mosaic “Civil Law”

Penal substitutionary atonement led some Reformers into the political mistake of reproducing in gentile nations the “civil law” portion of the Law of Moses, which logically leads to Zionism as a companion.  This is called Reformed theonomy.  The English and American Puritans, advocates of this view, were the earliest and strongest advocates of Zionism, not coincidentally. 

How did Reformed theonomy come to be?  Whereas Martin Luther viewed the Law of Moses as a unity, and set aside as a whole by the Law of Christ (1 Corinthians 9:22; Hebrews 8:13),[57] John Calvin viewed the Law of Moses as having ongoing ethical use.  To Calvin, the Law of Moses consisted of three parts:  ceremonial, civil, and moral.[58]  Calvin said that the ceremonial law concerned the Jewish sanctuary and the sacrificial system, which Jesus set aside because of his claim to be the fulfillment of priest, sacrifice, and tabernacle in the Letter to the Hebrews.  The civil law was understood to include other aspects of Jewish civic life, including the Sinai covenant’s death penalty for blasphemy and witchcraft, which Calvin approved on multiple occasions and is a matter of grave concern.  The moral law had to do with personal conduct; the Reformers read Jesus as affirming the binding nature of the ten commandments as a whole, as more or less a preliminary to, or bare minimum of, Jesus’ own teaching, which made it easy to treat the moral law as merely part of the civil law and subsumed into it.  To be sure, Calvin made adultery punishable in Geneva by the death penalty.  This is surprising.  For such sins as unrepentant adultery, excommunication from the church community or limitation from full participation is commanded in Matthew 18:15 - 18 and 1 Corinthians 5:1 - 13.  Because Calvin found no support in the New Testament for making death the penalty for adultery, he relied upon “natural law.”[59]

On this matter, I believe Calvin was wrong and Luther correct, not least because ancient Israel’s institutions of land, family, and worship eludes this differentiation into ceremonial, civil, and moral categories.[60]  For instance, the practice of granting sabbath rest to land every seven years (Leviticus 25:1 - 7) was arguably moral, civil, and ceremonial.  Israel was to practice a roughly egalitarian land distribution and redistribution in the Jubilee Year, which was declared on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 25:9), which depended on moral, civil, and ceremonial laws.  Declaration of debt forgiveness in the Jubilee Year on a fixed calendar (Leviticus 25:10 - 11, 39 - 55) and on the seventh year on a rolling calendar from the point of indebtedness (Deuteronomy 15:1 - 18) was both moral, civil, and ceremonial.  Israel’s existence in the land, and thus civil and ceremonial activity, was dependent on their moral conduct (Leviticus 18, 20).  Many more examples of the inseparability of Jewish law can be cited, but that is a brief introduction.

In fact, Calvin deployed the portion of the Law of Moses that he considered “civil law” very unevenly.  He overturned the biblical disapproval of interest-rate lending, and tried to regulate it instead.  He did this by redefining “usury” to mean “interest-rate lending at an excessively high rate” instead of the biblical “lending with any interest-rate at all.”[61]  Most likely, Calvin, like other Protestant leaders, recognized that the movement needed funds; since Roman Catholics owned land, the Protestants needed to make alliances with merchants and businessmen.[62]  Calvin ignored the egalitarian land distribution vision of ancient Israel, which might be understandable given that he was quite urban and not rural; but against the portrait of Israel enjoying the fruitfulness of the land, Calvin also seems to have preferred that working people work for low wages because he thought wealth beyond sustenance was a spiritual distraction.[63]  He did not allow himself to be troubled by the changing and unstable history of ancient Israel’s political institutions, itself a matter worthy of much reflection, and simply approved of the civil magistrates of his day.[64] 

However, Calvin maintained a consistently strong interest in the blasphemy and witchcraft laws.  In 1547, theologian Jacques Gruet called Calvin a hypocrite; Calvin had the Genevan authorities arrest him, torture him for a month, and then behead him; they then burned not just Gruet's book of theology but his house also, while his wife stood by watching after she was dragged out.  In 1553, Unitarian Michael Servetus was found in Geneva attending a service; Geneva arrested him and burned him at the stake; Calvin collaborated with the Catholic leaders of the Spanish Inquisition and seems to have advocated for burning rather than beheading at their suggestion.[65]  In 1555, in a letter to Guillaume Farel, Calvin said he believed it is God’s sovereign will that those sentenced do not die quickly but slowly, after much torment and torture.[66]  Calvin defended his position and his exhortation of the Geneva city council to do these things by deploying Leviticus 24:16, the death penalty law for blasphemy to be carried out by the whole community, which of course assumed that Geneva could have its own version of the Sinai covenant with God. 

Calvin’s Geneva promoted itself as a model of a theocratic city.  Geneva influenced John Knox’s Scotland and other Protestant efforts elsewhere.  In November 1552, during Calvin’s lifetime and just months before Michael Servetus arrived in Geneva, the Geneva city council declared that Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion was "holy doctrine which no man might speak against."  From that point onwards, disagreeing with Calvin’s views was not just a church matter but a civil and capital crime.  At a maximum, it warranted the death penalty based on John Calvin’s own interpretation and application of Leviticus 24:16.  Indeed, according to the minutes recorded by the Geneva city council, one man who publicly disagreed with Calvin’s doctrine of predestination was flogged in public and exiled from the city.[67]  Not just religious blasphemy but accusations of witchcraft and witch trials are another topic that should also be carefully considered because witch trials are a variation on that same theme; Switzerland and Scotland were by far the worst on a per capita basis.[68] 

For forty years in Geneva, Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza taught avid listeners Reformed theonomy and the eventual physical return of the Jews to the land.  Like Calvin, Beza’s early training was in law.  In 1558, Beza was appointed lecturer in the academy in Geneva under Calvin and also pastor of one of the city’s congregations.  In 1560, Beza published his own confession in Latin; in 1563, it was first translated into English in London; translations into German, Dutch, and Italian soon followed.  For a year leading up to Calvin’s death in 1564, Calvin and Beza worked together to ensure a smooth transition for Beza to eventually be named Calvin’s successor at the academy, moderator of the local presbytery, and leading international representative of the Swiss Reformation tradition.  This historical record of the close friendship and collaboration between Calvin and Beza inclines me to think that Calvin’s own position on Romans 11:25 - 26 and Zionism was or became the same as Beza’s.  But this is a secondary matter.

Reformed theonomy is therefore the view that gentile Christians have an obligation to uphold the moral law in their personal lives, and also strive to implement the civil law in the cities and nations in which they live.  In principle, Reformed theonomy envisions the ideal state of affairs as gentile Christian nations looking more and more like ancient Israel in their legal policies.  And if this be so for gentile Christian nations, then why would it not be so for Jews in their own country and land?[69]  While the Reformed non-theonomic position developed later for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, it is quite notable that the theonomic position developed first.  It was present in the early American theologian Jonathan Edwards, who was instrumental in receiving and passing on the English Puritan understanding of “all Israel will be saved” as entailing both a spiritual turning to Christ and a physical return to the land.[70]  Significantly, Edwards was a post-millennialist, not a premillennialist, who nevertheless believed that Israel’s destiny would thwart “the Turk” (Islam) and the influence of “the Pope” (Catholicism).  It also continues, especially in the United States in the legacy of R.J. Rushdoony and “Christian dominionism” or “Christian reconstructionism” or “Christian nationalism,” which is a matter of much concern.[71]  The English Puritan use of Zionism as a way of holding Islamic powers in check is very much alive and well in U.S. foreign policy.

Readers should also notice the sociological results of Reformed theonomy are predictable.  The logical goal of this theology is authoritarian dominance in the form of Christian empire or Christian nationalism.  And, if Protestant nation-states are to be organized by religious confession, implicating all citizens, then Protestants of this persuasion would assume that some form of Zionism is necessary for Jews.  While a certain paternalistic type of philo-Semitism was possible among some in the United Kingdom and the United States, political anti-Semitism would be frequent as well.  We must beware how politically populist, racist, and fascist motivations can play a role in the mental processes of an individual and the social processes of groups. 

We must also note when the opposite happened in history, and why:  In the United States, for instance, Roger Williams was the Baptist political pluralist who opposed Puritan theocracy.  His influence in Providence, Rhode Island made it the home of religious dissidents, Native Americans, and later, the first Jewish synagogue in North America - established in 1763.  While any given Christian might arrive at Reformed theonomy honestly, we cannot discount the role emotionality (fear, disgust, prejudice, trauma, etc.) plays in any given case.  Nor can we discount them in Calvin himself.

Mistake #3:  Ethical Behavior and What It Means to Be Human

Penal substitutionary atonement and its corollaries also shift our understanding of why ethical norms are important to our human development and formation.  What are Christian ethics?  What purpose do they serve?  Why are ethics important to being human?  PSA led to a change in how Christians understood the answers to these questions; it reshaped the intersection of the ethical and the anthropological.

If I as a parent threaten my children with time outs for stealing cookies, I might feel like the connection between the two is my authority, pure and simple, but to them there is no intrinsic relationship between stealing cookies and getting a time out.  The relationship is extrinsic, and rests solely on my authority to hold those two things together.  By comparison, intrinsic consequences involve touching a hot stove or an electrical socket: the consequence for the act is bound up in the act itself because touching them is a rebellion against not just my authority but reality itself, and the way I designed the reality of our house to serve us all in the appropriate ways. 

The above question - what are Christian ethics? - is important because some Protestants think Jews can become part of the State of Israel, live by Old Testament ethics which they view as just-as-valid or even up-to-date instruction from God, and then eventually receive a reward from God in the form of Israeli geopolitical victory over the gentile nations.  Why do they think this?  Because penal substitutionary atonement encourages its adherents to think that the most important aspect of God’s relationship with humans is His authority and power, because He claims to be the source of the rewards and punishments on offer.  In PSA, the content of the ethics God gives us is less important than the sheer fact of His authority and power.

In PSA, God in theory offers extrinsic rewards based on each person’s deeds and deservingness.  PSA advocates tend to interpret the biblical language for heavenly, eternal rewards as experiences God simply gives us:  pleasure, rest, freedom from pain, etc.  The immediate corollary is reality:  No one merits any rewards but only demerits and punishments.  Jesus, therefore, has to take the punishments our demerits deserve and impute his righteous merit to us instead.  The framework of merit and extrinsic reward undergirds the transactions.

Theoretically, then, God might reward some people for following the teaching of Jesus, and reward others for following the teaching of Moses.  In this framework, what matters is not so much the content of the ethics but the devotion to God as an authority figure.  If the rewards God gives us are only vaguely related to our human nature, then the ethics God calls us to live by can also be only vaguely related to us.

The Orthodox Christian tradition, following the earliest Christians, understands Christian ethics differently.  Yes, the biblical language of rewards, if disconnected from the rest of Scripture, sounds like God’s rewards are extrinsic to us and simply given to us to experience, like pleasure, rest, etc. because God is the authority figure who doles them out   But in reality, the tradition insists that we must do deeper, internal work by the power of Christ before we truly experience Jesus and all his gifts as pleasure, rest, freedom from pain, etc.  For example, if we have not truly forgiven others, or at least cultivated the desire to forgive others even when we struggle, will we experience pleasure sharing Jesus’ presence with them?  If we have not truly rejected our addictions and lusts, or at least cultivated the desire for Jesus over and above them, will we experience pleasure when it is no longer possible to indulge those addictions?  Augustine of Hippo said that every disordered love is, and will be, its own punishment.[72]  And John of Damascus said of hell:

In eternity God supplies good things to all because He is the source of good things gushing forth goodness to all... while sinners desire sin though they do not have the material means to sin... they are punished without any consolation. For what is hell but the deprivation of that which is exceedingly desired by someone? Therefore, according to the analogy of desire, whoever desires God rejoices and whoever desires sin is punished.[73]

In other words, hell is not a different attribute of God that the damned experience, but the same place and the same experience of God while being in a different human condition.  God only gives good things, perhaps like a gardener and chef who brings forth ever more exquisite meals with new variations on foods while He enhances our taste buds.  But hell is that very same place and reality experienced not as pleasure but as pain because the damned have addicted themselves to earthly junk food.  Hell is an interior experience of being a petulant child.  Hell is not an extrinsic penalty imposed on people but is intrinsically related to people’s unfaithfulness - an end state of human development which is self-chosen and self-inflicted.  In that end state, human beings live out of disordered loves, as Augustine of Hippo put it, and wrong desires, as John of Damascus said, that they have cultivated in themselves, along with lies about God and reality by which they continue to deceive themselves.

The biblical language of rewards reflect our intrinsic rewards for becoming conformed to Christ’s likeness and in a very real sense, Jesus’ own human emotionality that people turn to him.  By knowing and loving Jesus, we are becoming who God always intended for us to become:  united with God in Christ by the Spirit.  The Orthodox call this theosis.  Jesus’ commandments, in other words, call us to participate in the trinitarian life and love of God (John 15:9; 17:20 - 26).  They express in words how Jesus lived his own human life as the normative human life - the way of life that fulfills our human nature in partnership with him by the Spirit, and in relationship with others.  Within that understanding, Jesus’ commandments are both his gift to us and our obligation to receive, because they fulfill our human nature.  Ethical behavior is our response to the fact of our union with Christ and, through him, our partaking of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).  It is our recognition of reality - reality as God made it.  Even Jesus’ human desires and emotions are at work in us to help us desire and feel God’s best for us embodied in Jesus (Philippians 2:12 - 13).

A pastoral note on spiritual formation will demonstrate the difference.  For Protestants raised in the tradition of deeds and deservingness, Christian ethics with high stakes outcomes often raises alarming emotional concerns.  What happens if we sin?  To which the Orthodox Christians simply point to repentance, prayer, confession, reconciliation, the eucharistic meal, pastoral guidance and church discipline, and so forth.  They do so from within a medical, restorative paradigm: God is a loving doctor who will always receive us, even if we bring Him news of our sins, because He wants for us life, health, and flourishing even more than we do.  Why would God reject us if He loves us?  The questions of whether God accepts us, truly knows us, affectionately loves us, and still desires to partner with us are not in doubt.  Protestants, however, tend to hear repentance, prayer, confession, etc. as more “good deeds” on a “to do list” which they do quite imperfectly.  That is because they think of God from within a legal, retributive paradigm: God is a demanding lawgiver and judge with whom we have an ambivalent emotional relationship, even if Jesus is positioned between us legally.  Does God love me or does He only love Jesus?  Does God the Father truly know me or has Jesus hidden me from him?  Does God feel affection towards me or does He only tolerate me?  Does God still want to partner with me, or am I better on the bench or the sidelines?

Desires and Determinations - An Appreciation of the Jewish Wisdom Tradition

I want to be careful that readers do not get the wrong idea about the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.  We must be mindful of the fact that the way people have used and abused the Bible colors how we read it.  God’s relationship to ancient Israel was not simply one of pure authority, but rather of divine wisdom undergirding all things.  God made the creation by His wisdom, and gives His commandments to us out of His wisdom (Proverbs 8:22 - 23).  To suggest otherwise means that God commands things that are strangely inappropriate for His creation, or that God made the creation in some way that is disconnected from His commandments and moral character.  Either hypothetical case would boggle the Jewish mind. 

Moreover, God made the fruit of the garden fitted to our taste buds.  In God’s goodness and wisdom, God made us with a desire to eat.  That good desire, ordered appropriately by Him, leads to our growth, not just in physical maturity and size, but also in our ability to combine flavors, cook, and enjoy our culinary art.  Our desire, when rightly ordered by God, reflects how God made reality. 

Ancient Israel perceived the reality of God’s wisdom behind both creation and commandment, as opposed to simply God’s raw power to reward and punish.  They knew that faithful obedience is intrinsically related to who and what we are now and who and what we are called by God to become.  We are not simply human beings, but also human becomings.  And God calls us to grow through the desires He put in us for more love, connection, goodness, beauty, truth, shalom, justice, and order, by internalizing His commandments because they correspond to our human nature; they make us more fit for God’s world and God’s partnership. 

Therefore, in Proverbs, reflecting on God’s commands makes us “wise” (Proverbs 1:1 – 8); in the Psalms, doing so helps us “delight” in God and His word (Psalm 1:2).  For God’s commands are appropriate to us as God’s creations.  Through them, God directs us through our own desires to the fulfillment of our human nature and purpose.  For example, Psalm 37 speaks to those who wrestle with why evil doers and oppressors enjoy material blessing in the land, and insists that delighting in God, as opposed to simply stealing or seeking revenge for one’s self or one’s family, will produce in the faithful a greater desire for God’s justice and shalom because it will be a shared prosperity and multiplied joy; thus, God will give the righteous the desires of their hearts (Psalm 37:4).  Also, Psalm 119 expands on Psalm 1: the Torah is a delight and can become so more and more (Psalm 119:16, 24, 35, 47, 70, 77, 92, 143, 174).  The Torah, notably, will enlarge the human heart: “You will enlarge my heart” (Psalm 119:32), for “I will walk in a wide place” (Psalm 119:45). Internalizing God’s wisdom into ourselves, or not, has an impact on us.  We impact our own development as human beings, as God intended because of His love for partnership with us.

The corruption of sin does not alter the basic categories of creation, although we can further damage ourselves and reality.  However much we now face sinful desires in ourselves that resist God, a situation acknowledged in the Psalms and supremely by Paul in Romans 7:14 – 25, that does not take away from the fact that we are already participating in God’s wisdom – and therefore in God Himself, in some sense – by our very creation.  If God’s commandments cause the heart to rejoice (Psalm 19:8), then the heart cannot be marred by sin beyond recognition.  We may struggle to follow the commandments of God.  Yet our struggles are framed by a prior assurance of God’s love for us as Creator, a teleological hope in God’s goodness to heal human nature as part of our destiny (Deuteronomy 30:6; Jeremiah 4:4; 31:31 – 34; Ezekiel 36:26 – 36; Psalm 51:9 - 11), along with joy in finding in ourselves a desire to follow those commands in the present, despite the resistance we also feel. That is arguably why Paul can speak of a true “I myself” in contrast to the alien “sin that indwells me” (Romans 7:18) in that convoluted journey of self-diagnosis.  Thus, those Israelites who were faithful developed a deeper hope for healing, and for the Messiah.  The desires God cultivated in ancient Israel led directly to their partnership with Him in diagnosing the disease in the Scriptures, receiving, and preserving them.

John Cassian (c.360 - c.435) is a good example of how early Christians continued in the paradigm of Jewish wisdom, now centering the exalted Jesus who embodied the very wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24, 28) in his life and teaching. Significantly, John Cassian was a respected monastic leader who was a contemporary of Pelagius and Augustine.  He addressed the extremes taught by both.  He acknowledged that we inherit a fallen human nature, contra Pelagius, but insisted that we remain free to choose Christ and virtue because of God’s constant activity in us, contra Augustine.  Cassian acknowledged human delight and God’s constant work in us.  He said:

It cannot then be doubted that there are by nature some seeds of goodness in every soul implanted by the kindness of the Creator: but unless these are quickened by the assistance of God, they will not be able to attain to an increase of perfection… And therefore the will always remains free in man, and can either neglect or delight in the grace of God.  For the Apostle would not have commanded saying: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” [Philippians 2:13a] had he not known that it could be advanced or neglected by us.  But that men might not fancy that they had no need of Divine aid for the work of Salvation, he subjoins: “For it is God that works in you both to will and to do, of His good pleasure” [Philippians 2:13b]. And therefore he warns Timothy and says: “Neglect not the grace of God which is in Thee,” [1 Timothy 4:14] and again: “For which cause I exhort thee to stir up the grace of God which is in thee…” [2 Timothy 1:6][74]

The Eastern Orthodox consider John Cassian to be their representative in the debate between Pelagius and Augustine.[75]  The West presents Pelagius’ complete freedom of the will in comparison with Augustine’s complete bondage of the will to sin.  However, the Greek-speaking church actually received and understood the debate not on its own terms, but instead repositioned it to serve as an opening into how the human will and human desires mutually influence each other and impact human nature.  Sadly, in the Western church, John Cassian is rarely mentioned.  This repeated oversight makes the choice between Pelagius and Augustine a false one. 

If human beings only performed deeds that we decided to do by our will, then it would be appropriate to call us “human doings.”  But if we are called by God to not merely do good and loving deeds, but to become good and loving in ourselves, then we are stepping into the realm of virtue ethics, or human becoming.  A virtue ethics paradigm centers character development and the acquisition of virtue.[76] 

This biblical paradigm about desires forbids Christians from turning non-Christian people into mere instruments, or a means to an end.  This is relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because many American evangelicals regularly turn Israelis, and perhaps Jewish people more broadly, into pawns:  They are a means to an end - an instrument in the “end times scenario” Protestants think they perceive in Scripture.  John Hagee is a remarkable example of a Christian who does advocate such things.  Hagee is a white American pastor from Texas and founder of the Christian Zionist organization Christians United for Israel.  He is evangelical in the sense that he is a biblical literalist, and Pentecostal in the sense that he believes Christians should be speaking in tongues.  While Hagee adamantly believes that all Christians should support the State of Israel, he is quite anti-Semitic.  He argues, for instance, that Adolf Hitler was a “half-breed Jew,”[77] that the Nazi genocidal campaign befell Jews because God willed it after Jews rejected the Zionist leader Theodore Herzl,[78] and that conspiracy theories about banks, the Illuminati, and Satanists are true and have Jews behind them.[79]  For Hagee and others who share this posture, Jews and the State of Israel are simply thorns in the sides of Islam and Catholicism before they become pawns in God’s end-time chess game.  Not surprisingly, Hagee, a supporter of Donald Trump, also reflects the now-popular tendency of white American evangelicals, especially, to usepoliticians like they use Jewish people.  PSA fosters attitudes encouraging Christians to use non-Christians as tools and pawns.

Christian virtue ethics, by contrast, makes each person’s character formation in Christ Jesus the most important non-negotiable task and the highest good to which we can aspire and wish for others.  So for Christians to want non-Christians to do something that Jesus did not command lacks integrity, even if Christians think that other people should accomplish for them some political or geopolitical goal.  Or, to use “kingdom of God” language, the kingdom of God is not a physical or political or institutional accomplishment that Christians or others achieve, as important as those things may be in another way.  Rather, the kingdom of God is the manifestation of the rule of God in and over and through human nature as Jesus did.  Today, the kingdom of God that Christians seek is Christ-like character - the manifestation of the relationship that the Son has with the Father in the Spirit, but refracted in and through each person’s humanness as Christ takes up a dwelling in each person by his Spirit and by their partnership.  Once again, this means that the kingdom of God makes no human being a means to some other end.  The kingdom reign of God means that each person is an end.

With this restorative and medical understanding of human being and becoming that is centered in Christ, no Christians would advocate “using” non-Christians as tools for some other earthly and political end.  Neither Jesus nor the apostles had any “plan” for the world or the nation or people other than Jews and gentiles giving their lives to Jesus and coming into the obedience of faith in Christ Jesus (e.g. Romans 1:1 - 6; 9:1 - 5).  No Christian should advocate that anyone return to Mosaic ethics as an independent system of ethics, any more than he or she would commend any other system of ethics outside of the Bible.  For Jesus himself said that Moses gave certain laws to Israel reflecting a divine concession to “hardness of heart” (Matthew 19:3 - 12), a condition he was healing.  Since Jesus by his faithfulness has indeed healed it in his own humanity, and since he calls us to participate in him by the Spirit, why would a Christian recommend to others that they go backward and live by ethical teaching other than Jesus’?

Deeds and Deservingness - What the Protestant Shift Cost Us All

Penal substitutionary atonement focuses people’s attention on deeds and deservingness as opposed to desires and determinations, so PSA advocates tend to fail to grasp God’s developmental work with humanity’s desires.  Although this focus does not make logically necessary a view of Old Testament ethics as potentially independent of New Testament ethics, it makes such a view logically possible.  Joined with the Reformed theonomic view of the repeatability of Jewish civil law, PSA makes that further development likely.  I believe there are more reasons why Jews and gentiles alike suffered because of what PSA made possible.

Focusing on the growth and development of human desires by ancient Israel served little to no purpose in Lutheran and Reformed theologies, at least in the mainstream.  Luther used his “simultaneously sinner and saint” paradigm to encourage Christians to think of themselves as sinners always “starting over” with his notion of legal-forensic justification, and not reflect on our sanctification and spiritual progress.  To Gerharde O. Forde, the Lutheran representative in the book, Christian Spirituality: Five Views on Sanctification, reflecting on one’s own moral progress is detrimental and dangerous because it is an occasion for pride.[80]  Calvin and his followers, meanwhile, said that the law drives people to Christ for their justification, who sends them back to the law for their sanctification, which repeats the cycle but with an upward tilt, they hoped.[81]

Given pessimism about human deeds and deservingness, Western Protestants deployed the Myth of a Gloomy Judaism[82] against both ancient Israel and contemporary Judaism.  As Luther and Calvin preferred Augustine over all the other early fathers, they focused on the human will, its decision-making role, and its vacillations.  Thus, like Augustine, they grew concerned, for the human will in this sense appeared to them to never stabilize consistently on Christ.[83]  This instability presented them with a pastoral, exegetical, and theological question which they believed was solved by making the decisions of human wills the work of God, not humans.  Calvinists called this the doctrine of perseverance of the saints, or eternal security.  They believed the doctrine of assurance of salvation was the other side of the coin - the human experience of this hidden decree of God. 

How we read people spiritually relates to how we read people morally and politically.  These habits of reading contributed to naivete about the formation of civic societies and political communities.  Prior to the Protestant Reformation, Christians like Thomas Aquinas and Jews like Maimonides had already engaged Aristotle’s vision of the polis:  Human community was natural to humanity but still required that humans grow in virtue to participate most fully in that political community.  Most Enlightenment philosophies, however, asserted that individualism was natural and political community unnatural; relationships became simply social constructs. 

Yet to build community, not least rational nation-states, Enlightenment thinkers and politicians said that human dignity and worth is rationally “self-evident,” as they did in the U.S. Constitution.  But did the English colonists and Anglo-Americans after the American Revolution act as if it were self-evident?  Hardly.  At the same time, German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) tried to reposition Christian morality on a philosophical foundation rather than on historical revelation to ancient Israel.  Kant attempted to deduce and define morality based on pure reason alone.  Not coincidentally, Kant projected his notorious racial superiority[84] into the domain of Scripture.  R. Kendall Soulen calls attention to this statement of Kant:

Christianity’s first intention was really no other than to introduce a pure religious faith, over which no conflict of opinions can prevail; whereas that turmoil, through which the human race was disrupted and is still set at odds, arises solely from this, that what, by reason of an evil propensity of human nature, was in the beginning to serve merely for the introduction of pure religious faith, i.e. to win over for the new faith the nation habituated to the old historical believe through its own prejudices, was in the sequel made the foundation of a universal world-religion.[85]

Soulen calls this passage “astonishing” for Kant’s candid assertion that the Jewishness of Christian faith is the result of “an evil propensity of human nature” to be tribal and particular.  Kant preferred that Christian faith and the Christian church leave Jewishness behind.  In this way, Kant bears a curious resemblance to the second century gnostic heretic Marcion, who tried to break the New Testament’s relationship with the Old Testament, as if the relationship was coincidental and not essential. 

What if, in response to the Kantian tendency to stress rationality alone as the self-evident basis for universal human dignity, Christians had insisted on honoring ancient Israel as the historical source, not only of the idea of universal human dignity, but also an expression of human development individually and corporately?  What if Christians understood ancient Israel as a multi-ethnic faith - a faith that attracted gentiles through hope and wisdom and desire - with Christianity as its heir, and in this sense, dialogue partner? 

Imagine the conversation that might have resulted if Israel ben Eliezer, also known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698 - 1760), founder of Hasidic Judaism, met John Wesley (1703 - 1791), founder of Methodism.  Both Hasidism and Methodism developed in places where the state-church union characteristic of many medieval states was weakening.  In other words, people encountered, in a limited sense, a competitive marketplace concerning religions.  This afforded them some religious-theological innovations and required ethical reflection on the relationship between political power and religious adherence.  This surely plays some role, for instance, in why Hasidic Jews traditionally rejected Zionism, and quite vehemently.  Poland had been the most welcoming country in Europe to Jews from 1025 - 1795[86] on account of its weak centralized state[87] and perhaps some Christian influence among the rulers such that they defied official Catholic anti-Semitism.  Meanwhile, England’s Parliament was also granting religious freedom, first in the North American colonies, then in the motherland.[88]  King Charles II approved of the vision of religious freedom in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, granting the colony in the Royal Charter of 1663, which led to Quakers and Jews settling in the colony.

Both Hasidism and Methodism stressed more human participation in the divine life compared to the traditions from which they emerged, which stressed either strict separation or a heavy dose of rationalism.  Both involved re-envisioning the interrelationship between human and divine and between human and human.  Both led to new combinations of ethical distinctions and strictness, but also physicality and emotionality, even music and melody.  Baal Shem Tov made use of the Jewish mystical tradition called Kabbalah, especially as promoted by the writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534 - 1572), through whom the phrase tikkun olam, meaning “to repair the world,” was popularized throughout Judaism.  According to philosopher Rachel Elior, the various Hasidic thinkers were rooted in the theological idea that the immanent God moved in the world to create “space” for finite others, and thus the movement of the Infinite to create the Finite in a form of self-exile generates the return movement of the Finite back to the Infinite.[89]  In this “space,” God is still present in diminished form as He engages with humans to call them to communion with Himself.  The Hasidim taught that the human response was ceaseless contemplation and awareness of God resulting in a state of bliss.  Martin Buber explained Hasidism as a spirituality for everyday life, in a combination of ecstasy and service.[90]  Yet, curiously, Hasidic leaders were regarded in quasi-messianic terms:  exemplars in whom the congregation gathered around could participate, which seems like a framework through which Christians might present the claims of Jesus of Nazareth.  How early Hasidism might have been influenced by early Methodism is beyond my ability to imagine.  But such an exchange might have accelerated, on the Christian side, in England, Europe, and the Americas, the growth of civic religious freedom in the public square, on the grounds that God creates “space” for His creatures to choose Him.  This would have supported the Anabaptists in their observation about patristic thought prior to Augustine:  With regard to choosing Jesus or not, they unanimously condemned state-sponsored coercion and promoted civic freedom.

What about personal spiritual experience?  John Wesley drew inspiration from the Greek patristic writers,[91] especially Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius of Egypt, and taught about his “heart strangely warmed” and a second experience of God’s grace involving constancy in love for God which he called “Christian perfection,” or “total sanctification.”  From 1733, early in his preaching career, John Wesley called it “circumcision of the heart” and related the experience to holiness as defined by the rejection of conscious sins.[92]  For Wesley, the integration of faith and works as he understood “works” was essential - the Wesleyan formulation was that saving faith subsists in works - but foremost in emphasis was a somewhat mystical love for God.  He was responding to Protestant Reformers who neglected human desires in favor of deeds, which left a vacuum concerning the subjective human experience, especially emotional experience, of the Christian after conversion, since conversion was thought to be a response to the penal substitutionary atonement which occurred within God, not in the human.  Wesley vigorously rejected Calvin’s notion of “limited atonement,” because he understood God in Christ as pursuing all people, in a manner similar to how Hasidic Jews envisioned God pursuing all people.

John Wesley’s two-stage model of Christian growth was taken up by the “holiness movement” in the nineteenth century, then in a different way by Pentecostals in the early twentieth century in their insistence on speaking in tongues, and then by charismatic Protestants in less prescriptive directions in the late twentieth century.  Much more can be said elsewhere about this “second blessing” tradition and what makes it worthy of admiration and critique.  In terms of critique, Wesley’s desire to embrace both Western and Eastern Christian views on humanity and the fall, as well as his own acceptance of penal substitutionary atonement, created logical and emotional problems about the nature of human development and how we interact emotionally with theological portrayals of God’s character.[93] 

The Wesleyan Methodist movement John and his brother Charles started, along with its abolitionism,[94] did not sufficiently shed the individualism inherent in penal substitutionary atonement, to counteract other Anglo-American Protestant influences, including their political commitments in the age of colonialism and imperialism.  Despite courageous leadership, in 1844, the Methodist Church in the United States split sectionally over a bishop who refused to free his slaves, which suggests organizational weaknesses,[95] and perhaps pedagogical and theological weaknesses also.  In the PSA framework, one cannot condition conversion on any “work,” including freeing chattel slaves - people who were forcibly kidnapped (contra Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7) or sold and bought (contra Leviticus 25:42) or born into the condition and forced to remain (contra Deuteronomy 23:15 - 16).  While the New Testament's clearest By lacking the theological conviction to front-load the requirements of evangelism and discipleship, since PSA absolutely prevents any such front-loading, the when and how of freeing chattel slaves becomes difficult to pin down.  If not at conversion, then why at church membership?  Ordination?  Promotion to bishop?

Wesleyan Christians who emphasized holiness in the context of industrial and urban capitalism tended to react strongly to individual issues but less strongly to relational-institutional issues, especially over time.  They focused on individual issues such as gambling, drinking excessive alcohol, dress, and dancing; Northern Methodists supported workers’ rights in the form of slavery abolition but also “producerism” and workers’ rights in the collective bargaining power of unions.[96]  Methodists generally supported working-class labor organizations like the Knights of Labor, the Christian Labor Union, and the AFL-CIO.  Next to Catholics, Methodists ranked highest among Christian groups in being perceived as supporting workers’ rights, owing to their own working-class roots, their memory of John Wesley’s call for reforms in England, and early Methodists’ vision to “reform the Continent.”[97]  But they did not perceive the significance of Calvin’s compromise with usury, nor the growing power of banking and finance, which was the power of capital in independent, institutional form outside the immediate corporation with its own capital-labor struggle.  This vigorous critique of usury, indebtedness, and the power of lenders was rooted in Jewish law (Exodus 22:25 - 27; Leviticus 25; Deuteronomy 15:1 - 18; 23:17 - 20; 24:10 - 21), and early capitalism seems to have thrived, and perhaps even depended, on various Protestant attempts to ignore Jewish law precisely on this point - either by selectively deploying Jewish law like Calvin did, or by diminishing Jewish particularity wholesale like Kant.  And the “social gospel” movement among liberal-leaning White Protestants failed to address racial injustices at home,[98] and the suffering caused by American imperialism abroad; although various Black clergy did.[99] 

Others adapted the transactional language of “second blessing” biblical rewards to Western consumerism in “prosperity theology.”  Jesus spoke of internal rewards in the realm of character, virtue, and desire.  For example, Jesus spoke of being rewarded at the resurrection when you invite those who cannot repay you to your table fellowship, not because you will get more dessert (external rewards) but because you become the type of person who rejoices (internal rewards) when Jesus turns outsiders into insiders at his table (Luke 14:12 - 14).  A focus on divine immanence, return, and repair of our humanity might have helped to check people’s tendency to externalize transactional language, as if God will give out a winning lottery ticket.  The Hasidic vision might have reminded Protestants of the New Testament vision of Christ’s cosmic role as in Colossians and the Gospel of John:  in him we live and have our being (Acts 17:28); in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17); yet in us he comes to dwell (Colossians 1:27); for he is the true light who enlightens every person who comes into the world (John 1:9); he offers himself to us that we might have the light of life (John 8:12).  The “second blessing” model, in the end, could not bridge the distance Western Protestant theology had moved from the Eastern Christian traditions, the early church, and Hebraic-Jewish sensibilities.  I am pessimistic that there is such a bridge on these fundamental issues; I believe we simply need to repent and return.

By comparison, the Polish Hasidic tradition nurtured such modern luminaries as Martin Buber (1878 - 1965), an Israeli philosopher who argued for a “Hebrew humanism” and the importance of “I - Thou” relations,[100] and Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 - 1972), a Polish American rabbi, theologian, and philosopher who explored the nature of God’s pathos, or passions and emotions, in pursuit of His people,[101] a topic that serves as a helpful challenge to the Greek Christian tradition, and even before them, the Hebrew sages who translated the Hebrew Bible into the Greek Septuagint; some Greek, then Latin, writers were influenced by Hellenistic discourse about the use of the Greek terms pathos, pathe, and apatheia[102] such that some Christians today find it difficult to imagine that the human emotions of Jesus reflect something that might be called “divine emotions” or “divine pathos.”  Such an emphasis might have corrected the notion of “satisfaction” present in penal substitutionary atonement theory, which makes God formally indifferent between people who turn to Jesus and people who do not - on the claim that God will be supposedly “satisfied” with either outcome. Protestants impressed by God’s loving pathos for human relationship and flourishing might then have insisted that humans require not merely an indifferent state monopoly on violence and retributive justice in a “law and order” vision defending “private property” - the outward and social complement to penal substitutionary atonement[103] - but historical truth-telling, character formation, virtue ethics, emotional regulation, political cooperation, public investments, and restorative justice whenever possible to properly participate in and shape civil society.  For we must move towards repairing the world and restoring I - Thou relationships.

Finally, because Protestants oversimplified human desires, they also oversimplified the doctrine of Scripture - to be precise, their understanding of how ancient Israel came to produce the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.  The Protestant emphasis on deeds led to their tendency to simplify biblical stories down to a character’s deeds, either faithful or not. John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis 12, for instance, assigns Abraham’s faith in God and obedience in a surprisingly full sense to the very first phrase, “Get thee out of thy country into a land that I will show thee” in 12:1.[104]  Calvin portrays Abram as not undergoing a halting and struggling journey to believe God in every way.  Instead, Abram, in his view, was fully “proved” from some earlier point back in Haran.  To win Abram’s love and build up his faith, God did not even have to promise the childless couple Abram and Sarai to make them into a “great nation” in Genesis 12:2, which is a touching play on the meaning of Abram’s name, to that point a bitter irony:  “father.”  By the time Genesis 12:1 opens, according to Calvin, does Abram have anything to learn? 

Calvin did the same thing with regards to the Canaanite in the land mentioned in Genesis 12:6.  To Calvin, the Canaanites were already at that point in time “that perfidious and wicked nation, destitute of all humanity.”[105]  Calvin speaks thus without regard for the witness that Abraham and Sarah bear towards them and despite those Canaanites who would welcome the chosen family or even intermarry with them, with some level of faith:  Melchizedek, king of Salem, and the grateful king of Sodom (Genesis 14:17 - 24); Tamar and the other Canaanite women who would marry the sons of Jacob (Genesis 38:1 - 6); Rahab and her household who marry into the tribe of Judah (Joshua 2 - 6); the Gibeonites who pledged themselves to Israel (Joshua 9 - 11). 

Calvin also interprets Abram in Genesis 15:1 - 6 as if Abram’s faith were static or needed no clarification or refinement.  Calvin does not connect the “fear” in Genesis 15:1 to Abram’s potential fear of reprisal from the Mesopotamian kings whom he battled in Genesis 14, or anyone else who would take him as a military threat.  Abram, by asking if he could name his servant Eleazar as his heir instead of waiting for God to provide a biological son with Sarai, wished to fall back on the culturally acceptable custom of an older man adopting another mature man to be his heir.  But God had already made clear that Sarai was Abram’s co-partner and co-recipient of God’s blessing in Genesis 12:10 - 20; Sarai was not “sister” but “wife” and soon to be mother as Abram was soon to be father.  Calvin, however, says that Abram only “appears to be wanting in reverence”; a request to which God “regards with favor.”[106]  God “had approved the wish of Abram” because “Abram had not been impelled by any carnal affection to offer up this prayer, but by a pious and holy desire of enjoying the benediction promised to him.”[107]

While many New Testament citations of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, like Hebrews 11, understandably highlight binary choices of faithfulness or unfaithfulness, the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament itself is much more of a romance:  God drew people into partnership via their own desires.  God won over Abraham and Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Jacob, Esau, Judah, Joseph, and Moses into partnership.  Lutheran and Reformed reliance on Augustine’s doctrines of total depravity and double predestination made that interpretation of God’s interaction with the Hebrew chosen family dubious, if not practically irrelevant.  Besides that, they as PSA advocates had little to no reason to appreciate God’s partial success in winning and wooing Israel into partnership.  Nor did they have much reason to celebrate Israel’s partial success in loving God, following God’s commandments imperfectly, and wanting to become better partners to God, even when that required purification and “circumcision of the heart.”  They did not perceive the interaction of decisions and desires - desires being the deeper and more important and original category in Christian spiritual formation.  They overlooked the role of positive human desires for Jesus, which led ancient Israel to hope for themselves and even the gentiles, and how faithful decisions and deeds in partnership with Christ are important and vital, but in a secondary and not primary sense - not as a track record in themselves, but to help cultivate our desires for Jesus; not for God’s good, but for ours. 

Correspondingly, Protestant Reformers developed a marked tendency to view ancient Israel’s gift of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament in divine, but not human, terms.  When answering the question of why the biblical writers and prophets use such earthly and “terrestrial” expressions as the great hope in Psalm 37, “The righteous shall inherit the land,” John Calvin said they “described the blessedness of the future world under the type which the Lord had given them.”[108]  Calvin asserted that the human authors of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament “rise above the world and all present blessings.”  For Calvin, such Jewish language was metaphor and poetry; he claimed that both the original human authors and the true readers of Scripture could and should see transparently through the local, terrestrial words.  To Protestants, the human side of Scripture simply could not be the result of ancient Israelites who were won over by God through their desires for things as simple as children or the challenging land of Canaan.  If the ancient Israelites had poetic skills, rich creativity, and imaginations expanded by their desire for God’s good creation and so moved to be faithful to God, to know and understand prior words from God, to be healed of the sin-sickness, and to see God’s good world repaired even for the gentiles and with their partnership, it mattered little.  God in His omnipotence used unwitting humans like machines to write the original autographs.  Or, God somehow meant something more, even other, than what the human writers wrote.  Protestants thus understood the reception and preservation of Scripture by the Jewish community not as the result of desires God had maintained in them despite the fall and cultivated in them by the beauty and goodness of creation - because His original intention for humans and creation was to be fruitful gardens in their own respective ways - but as a divine miracle of a God who intervened with stiff-necked, stubborn people who either could not rise above their local, “terrestrial” expressions or were “spiritually dead” and had no desire for God’s purposes in themselves. 

Because Protestants approached Scripture as a divine work, they left open a vacuum about Scripture as a human work.  They arguably left the field of biblical studies wide open for German “higher critics” to speculate quite irresponsibly about the human side of that work, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion that Jews and Christians harbored a secret resentment festering under the morality of mercy.[109]  Thus, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars who claimed to be studying the human origins of Scripture from a historical perspective, calling their endeavor “Biblical Theology” as distinct from the medieval church’s use of Scripture in its “Dogmatic Theology.”[110]  They theorized extensively about the supposedly political desires and motivations behind the composition and canonization of the Bible.  Julius Wellhausen’s Documentary Hypothesis is a prime example of a larger trend:

One constant in this great shift was the complete domination of the German university system by Protestants.  Jews and Catholics would have had a tough time university-hopping as Wellhausen did, and experienced a kind of academically marginalized status in biblical studies.  Wellhausen, skeptical of Catholicism and hostile to Judaism, was a good reflection of the mainstream in this era…

Wellhausen’s writings participated in the anti-Jewish thrust of Bismarck’s Germany. Hence, the widespread negative reaction Jewish scholars had to Wellhausen’s oeuvre: Jewish readers contemporary with Wellhausen understood the real-life implications of his work all too well.[111] 

Had Protestant leaders honored ancient Israel’s human desires and motivations in their participation in the Hebrew Scriptures / Old Testament, perhaps the “higher critics” might not have been German Protestant academics whose work dovetailed with the Nazi effort to make Jews look scheming, untrustworthy, and intellectually vapid.  Perhaps there might not have been “higher critics” at all. 

Jewish Zionism surged after the Nazi atrocities of World War II, understandably, despite the Talmudic tradition.  But unfortunately we must be clear-eyed about this as well.  We must situate the phenomenon of Jewish Zionism and the historical trauma of the Shoah (Holocaust) in relation to Christian anti-Semitic factors and specifically Protestant tendencies related to the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament.  Those factors and tendencies further impacted the way the Jewish community was perceived and treated.  Although Christian Zionism would continue to evolve into a surprisingly eclectic group,[112] the Jewish community continues to be impacted by the same forces set into motion by these Protestant tendencies.

Reflection

Why is Christian Zionism a Protestant phenomenon?  Not just for historical and circumstantial reasons, but for intellectual and theological reasons unique to the Protestant tradition broadly.  Let me recap:  Protestants have an anti-intellectual attitude that leads them to read biblical words and believe they already know what the meaning of those words are.  Connected with this habit of reading are three major theological shifts away from the early Christians.  First, the theory of divine retributive justice and penal substitutionary atonement leads Protestants to feel uneasy with the experience of the Jewish people, both ancient and modern, which reflects the actual unease they should feel about the notion that God’s justice is retributive, the heart of much of Protestant theology.  Second, because PSA makes logically possible the view of Reformed theonomists, that the civil law portion of the Law of Moses is a blueprint for nations.  The corollary to that view is the view that Jews should have their own nation.  Third, because PSA shifts the locus of human life from desires to deeds, PSA oversimplifies our view of what it means to be human, downplays the embodied human life of Jesus, and suggests that Old Testament ethics might be as relevant to Jews as New Testament ethics are relevant to Christians just because they both came from God, which then encourages Christians to believe that Old Testament ethics are sufficient for Jews. 

This constellation of theological shifts, far from leading to an anchored appreciation of the Jewish experience, both ancient and modern, led to the denigration of Jews, then and now.  Because the understanding of all humanity’s exile from the garden and Israel’s exile from 586 BC are rarely brought to bear upon the “private property” ethics of the Anglo-American legal tradition, Western Protestants rarely confront their own fears and prejudices with the gospel, which means that Jewish people and other “outsiders” suffer.  Christian Zionism, or “Jews over there” to put it crudely, becomes the emotional release valve and escape hatch, since it offers a thin justification for anti-Jewish sentiment at home.  The rebounding and boomeranging effect of exile and our attempt to reject our theological pilgrimage has been a wound in every civilization, and Christian Zionism seems to be one more iteration and expression of it in the West.

Notes

[1] Lewis, Donald M. “A Very Short History of Christian Zionism.” Edited by Cannon, Mae Elise. A Land Full of God: Christian Perspectives on the Holy Land. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishing. 2017. 111 - 113. Lewis, Donald. The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury And Evangelical Support For A Jewish Homeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014. 380. See also Murray, Iain. The Puritan Hope. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth. 1971. 326.  Ice, Thomas D. “Lovers of Zion: A History of Christian Zionism.” Liberty University. 2009. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=pretrib_arch

[2] Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Chapter 7.

[3] Costea, Laura. “What Did Jesus Say About Antisemitism?” Jews for Jesus. September 12, 2023. https://jewsforjesus.org/learn/what-did-jesus-say-about-antisemitism. Costea says, “If that’s so, then Jesus is reinforcing the historical fact that many nations have faced judgment because of how they treated Israel. It seems like Jesus tells the tale of the sheep and the goats to say, “Don’t mess with the apple of God’s eye.””

[4] Khalil, Gregory. “Evangelical Christians must rethink their reflexive support for Israel.” Religion News Service. May 27, 2021. https://religionnews.com/2021/05/27/evangelical-christians-must-rethink-their-reflexive-support-for-israel/. Brimmer, Rebecca J. “Israel and God’s Judgment on the Nations.” Bridges for Peace. October 1, 2015. https://www.bridgesforpeace.com/compassion/israel-gods-judgment-nations/.  “The Bible says God is going to judge the nations. In Matthew 25 Yeshua talks about the judgment of the nations and says they will be judged by how they treated His brethren, for example feeding, clothing, visiting prisoners. He taught this in the first century to His Jewish disciples, and there is no doubt in my mind that they assumed He was talking about the Jewish people. I think that is still true—God is going to judge the nations concerning how they treat the Jewish people… When our country curses Israel—we will bless Israel. When our country tries to force Israel to divide its Land—we will stand with Israel. We will pray for Israel. We will feed the hungry in Israel. We will help the Jewish people come home.”

[5] Wright, N.T. The New Testament and the People of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Fortress Press. 1992.

[6] Ahlstrom, Sidney. “The Scottish Philosophy and American Theology,” Church History 24. 1955. 257-72. Noll, Mark. “Common Sense Traditions and American Evangelical Thought,” American Quarterly 37.2. 1985. 218. Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980. Holified, E. Brooks. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2003.

[7] Van Wart, Adam. “The Relationship Of Common Sense Realism To Dispensationalism’s Hermeneutics and A Priori Faith Commitments.” Bible.org | Southwest Regional Meeting Evangelical Theological Society. April 19, 2005. https://bible.org/article/relationship-common-sense-realism-dispensationalism%E2%80%99s-hermeneutics-and-ia-priorii-faith-comm.

[8] Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book 2. Chapter 11. 489 - 492.

[9] Ibid 492 - 496.

[10] Ibid 496 - 498.

[11] Ibid 498 - 501.

[12] Ibid 501 - 503.

[13] Ibid 497. 

[14] Ibid 494.

[15] Ibid 492. 

[16] While some scholars argue that Luther and Calvin themselves did not place the legal-forensic aspects of biblical language at the center of their respective theologies, such attempts at nuancing or qualifying them would not be necessary had the popular understanding of PSA been so widespread and influential from the start.  

For example, Martin Luther, in his Lectures on Galatians, asserted that Jesus on the cross “bore the person of a sinner and a thief -- and not of one but of all sinners and thieves.”  He declares that Jesus took the punishments people deserved - not the traditional understanding that Jesus shared in our fallen human nature and then lived and died to triumph over the corruption of sin within the particular instance of human nature he shared with us.  Thus Luther confuses the theological categories of human nature and human persons, which is deeply problematic.  See Oakes S.J., Edward T. Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 2011. 230.  Quoting Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1 - 4, in Luther’s Works, volume 26, p.277.

            On John Calvin, however closely one reads his writings or charitably his intentions, the fact remains that in the Swiss Helvetic Confession of 1536, the Dutch Belgic Confession of 1561, the Canons of Dordt of 1619, and the Westminster Confession of 1643, arguably the most authoritative statements in the Reformed tradition, the atonement Jesus accomplished on the cross is understood as a legal “satisfaction” of divine retributive justice - an exhaustion of an entire attribute of God with regards to the elect.  "Imputed Righteousness. For Christ took upon himself and bore the sins of the world, and satisfied divine justice.” (Swiss Helvetic Confession, chapter 15; cf. Belgic Confession, articles 21, 22, 24).  “God is not only supremely merciful, but also supremely just. His justice requires (as he has revealed himself in the Word) that the sins we have committed against his infinite majesty be punished with both temporal and eternal punishments, of soul as well as body. We cannot escape these punishments unless satisfaction is given to God's justice.” (Canons of Dordt 1).  Westminster further coordinates the legal satisfaction of retributive justice via absorption of punishment with the economic “purchase” understanding of redemption as if to satisfy the price demanded for it:  “The Lord Jesus… has fully satisfied the justice of His Father; and purchased, not only reconciliation, but an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, for those whom the Father has given unto Him.” (Westminster Confession, chapter 8, paragraph 5)  Note that the Canons of Dordt, in reaction to Jacob Arminius (1560 - 1609), say that Christ’s atonement was “more than sufficient for all” but only “effective” for the elect (compare Articles 3 and 8).  To this, the question can be raised:  Why is there any divine retributive wrath leftover for anyone at all?  The Westminster Confession more explicitly develops the notion of “limited atonement” for the elect as the more logical corollary to penal substitution than Dordt.  Also, it is very significant that the Westminster Confession was drawn up by the “Christian nationalists” of their time:  English Puritans and the Scottish covenanters. The fact that the legal-punitive framing controls and dominates the concepts of atonement and salvation is shown in that “righteousness” for the believer is considered to be “imputed” and not participatory-actual. 

[17] Hummel, Daniel G. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 2023.

[18] Irenaeus of Lyons.  Against Heresies 4.9.3.  “For the new covenant having been known and preached by the prophets, He who was to carry it out according to the good pleasure of the Father was also preached, having been revealed to men as God pleased; that they might always make progress through believing in Him, and by means of the [successive] covenants, should gradually attain to perfect salvation.” Italics mine.

[19] Ibid 4.13.2.

[20] Ibid 4.21.3.  Irenaeus says that God, “at that time, indeed, by means of His patriarchs and prophets, was prefiguring and declaring beforehand future things, fulfilling His part by anticipation in the dispensations of God, and accustoming His inheritance to obey God, and to pass through the world as in a state of pilgrimage, to follow His word, and to indicate beforehand things to come. For with God there is nothing without purpose or due signification.” italics mine.

[21] Ibid 4.14.2.  “Thus it was, too, that God formed man at the first, because of His munificence; but chose the patriarchs for the sake of their salvation; and prepared a people beforehand, teaching the headstrong to follow God; and raised up prophets upon earth, accustoming man to bear His Spirit [within him], and to hold communion with God: He Himself, indeed, having need of nothing, but granting communion with Himself to those who stood in need of it, and sketching out, like an architect, the plan of salvation to those that pleased Him.”

[22] Ibid 3.18.7. See also 2.12.4; 3.18.1; 5.1.3.

[23] Ibid 3.18.7. See also Irenaeus of Lyons. Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching 32. “Because death reigned over the flesh, it was right that through the flesh it should lose its force and let man go free from its oppression. So the Word was made flesh, that, through that very flesh which sin had ruled and dominated, it should lose its force and be no longer in us. And therefore our Lord took that same original formation as (His) entry into flesh, so that He might draw near and contend on behalf of the fathers, and conquer by Adam that which by Adam had stricken us down.”

[24] Ibid 4.25.1. Italics mine.

[25] For example, Justin said, “Moreover, that in your nation there never failed either prophet or ruler, from the time when they began until the time when this Jesus Christ appeared and suffered, you will not venture shamelessly to assert, nor can you prove it. For though you affirm that Herod, after whose [reign] He suffered, was an Ashkelonite, nevertheless you admit that there was a high priest in your nation; so that you then had one who presented offerings according to the law of Moses, and observed the other legal ceremonies; also [you had] prophets in succession until John, (even then, too, when your nation was carried captive to Babylon, when your land was ravaged by war, and the sacred vessels carried off); there never failed to be a prophet among you, who was lord, and leader, and ruler of your nation. For the Spirit which was in the prophets anointed your kings, and established them. But after the manifestation and death of our Jesus Christ in your nation, there was and is nowhere any prophet: nay, further, you ceased to exist under your own king, your land was laid waste, and forsaken like a lodge in a vineyard; and the statement of Scripture, in the mouth of Jacob, `And He shall be the desire of nations,' meant symbolically His two advents, and that the nations would believe in Him; which facts you may now at length discern. For those out of all the nations who are pious and righteous through the faith of Christ, look for His future appearance.” (Dialogue with Trypho 52)

But this is very confusing. Prophets were not active between Malachi and John the Baptist, for hundreds of years, which led to a scribal and wisdom tradition that was rich in its own way but unmistakably not prophetic. Besides that, it is difficult to understand why Justin says that after the Babylonian exile, there were prophets who "never failed" to be "lord, and leader, and ruler of your nation."

Proper kings were not present, either. Justin refers to Herod as an Ashkelonite, one of the  Canaanite peoples, as a king. But he said this right after quoting Jacob's prophetic blessing on Judah in Genesis 49:8 - 12, which said that the kingly scepter would be in Jewish tribe of Judah. So his purpose in saying all this is unclear. Herod Antipas, under whom Jesus suffered, was not a king - he was a tetrarch. Nor was he a Canaanite Ashkelonite in other sources - he was a descendant of Edom on his father's (Herod the Great) side and an Nabatean Arab on his grandmother's side. Josephus said that Herod the Great was in some way a descendant of Eleazar Maccabeus, but that would make Herod a distant member of the tribe of Levi, not Judah.

High priests there were, but they were looked at with some reservations - the Pharisees had mild reservations and Qumran had very deep reservations, enough to ignore Jerusalem completely - because the Roman Empire forced high priests to serve for one year only and then give up the office, whereas high priests were supposed to serve for their whole lifetime according to the law of Moses. So it is very hard to understand what logical or rhetorical points Justin thinks he is scoring.

Then, Justin says to Trypho, “But you were never shown to be possessed of friendship or love either towards God, or towards the prophets, or towards yourselves, but, as is evident, you are ever found to be idolaters and murderers of righteous men, so that you laid hands even on Christ Himself; and to this very day you abide in your wickedness, execrating those who prove that this man who was crucified by you is the Christ.” (Dialogue with Trypho 93)  That is a denigration of the positive side of Israel's history, and the idea that collective guilt follows all Jews around since Jesus' death.

[26] Justin Martyr of Rome, Dialogue with Trypho 16.

[27] Irenaeus of Lyons.  Against Heresies 4.28.3

[28] Ibid 4.4.1

[29] Ibid 4.4.2

[30] Ibid 4.28.1 - 4.31.3

[31] Ibid 4.31.1.

[32] Ibid 4.33.1.

[33] Ibid 4.11.4. Cf. 4.29.1; 4.39.1 - 4.  Irenaeus argues that since human beings are also human becomings, we can cultivate desires in ourselves that can turn us against Jesus.  In effect, people can become addicted to something that is no longer possible.  This sad condition is due to God’s manner of creation:  “Man, being endowed with reason, and in this respect like to God, having been made free in his will, and with power over himself, is himself the cause to himself, that sometimes he becomes wheat, and sometimes chaff.” (4.4.3)  We can thus turn our rationality into irrationality, effectively become animal-like rather than god-like:  “Man, being in honor, did not understand: he was assimilated to senseless beasts, and made like to them.” (4.4.3)

[34] Ibid 4.12.1 - 5.

[35] Ibid 4.24.1 - 2.

[36] Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 2.9, 23.

[37] Macarius of Egypt. Fifty Spiritual Homilies 20.6; 4.13; 15.45.

[38] Cyril of Alexandria. Lecture 12: On the Word Incarnate, and Made Man 6 - 8.

[39] John of Damascus. Against the Manicheans 94.1569, 1573. “In eternity God supplies good things to all because He is the source of good things gushing forth goodness to all... After death, there is no means for repentance, not because God does not accept repentance – He cannot deny Himself nor lose His compassion – but the soul does not change anymore... people after death are unchangeable, so that on the one hand the righteous desire God and always have Him to rejoice in, while sinners desire sin though they do not have the material means to sin... they are punished without any consolation. For what is hell but the deprivation of that which is exceedingly desired by someone? Therefore, according to the analogy of desire, whoever desires God rejoices and whoever desires sin is punished.”

[40] Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. 4.29.1; 4.39.4. “For one and the same God [who blesses those who believe] inflicts blindness upon those who do not believe, but who set Him at naught; just as the sun, which is a creature of His, [blinds] those who, by reason of any weakness of the eyes cannot behold his light; but to those who believe in Him and follow Him, He grants a fuller and greater illumination of mind.”  Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lecture VI: On the Unity of God, paragraph 29: “The sun also blinds those whose sight is dim: and they whose eyes are diseased are hurt by the light and blinded. Not that the sun’s nature is to blind, but that the substance of the eyes is incapable of seeing. In like manner unbelievers being diseased in their heart cannot look upon the radiance of the Godhead.”

[41] Alfeyev, Metropolitan Hilarion. Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009. For a condensed version, see also Arakaki, Robert. “Evidence for Christ’s Descent Into Hell.” Orthodox-Reformed Bridge, April 6, 2018.  https://orthodoxbridge.com/2018/04/06/evidence-christs-descent-hell/. 

[42] Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.23.6. Methodius of Olympus. From the Discourse on the Resurrection 1.4 – 5. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation 8.1. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 45. Ambrose of Milan, On the Psalms 47 – 48. Maximus the Confessor, Ad Thalassios, Question 44.5.

[43] This is not to be confused with the Augustinian view now called original sin, which asserts that each human being inherits the personal guilt of Adam and Eve; ancestral sin maintains that every person inherits the fallen and weakened human nature of Adam and Eve, but each person makes choices from that point and thus, each person’s guilt is their own.

[44] Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. New York, NY: Harper. 1997. Chapter 3.

[45] Gottheil, Richard and Hermann Vogelstein, “Church Councils.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Volume 4. New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls. 1906. 78. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/4379-church-councils

[46] John Chrysostom. Discourses Against Judaizing Christians. Fathers of the Church Volume 68. Translated by Paul W. Harkins. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. 1979.

[47] Laqueur, Walter. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to The Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. 47 - 48.

[48] The Council of Nicea in 325 rejected the work of Polycarp and Irenaeus in honoring the Jewish lunar calendar and decided that Christians would henceforth use the Julian calendar.  Ambrose of Milan (330 - 397) argued against repaying Jews for Christians destroying a Jewish synagogue in Milan. 

[49] McGrath, Alister E. Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020 (4th edition). 7 - 58.

[50] “After explaining what Christ endured in the sight of man, the Creed appropriately adds the invisible and incomprehensible judgment which he endured before God, to teach us that not only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but that there was a greater and more excellent price — that he bore in his soul the tortures of a condemned and ruined man.” See Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.16.10.  The Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 reflects Calvin’s shift.  “Question: Why is there added: He descended into hell?  Answer:  In my greatest sorrows and temptations I may be assured and comforted that my Lord Jesus Christ, by his unspeakable anguish, pain, terror, and agony, which he endured throughout all his sufferings but especially on the cross, has delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell.” (Heidelberg Catechism 44).  John Stott discusses the anomalies in John Calvin’s logic; see Stott, John R.W. The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 1986. 81. On the meaning and usages of Psalm 22:1, see Nagasawa, Mako A. My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me? Available at www.anastasiscenterblog.org/my-god-my-god. 

[51] Emerson, Matt. “Christ’s Descent to the Dead.” The Gospel Coalition. Date unknown. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/christs-descent-dead/.

[52] Grudem, Wayne A. “He Did Not Descent Into Hell: A Plea for Following Scripture Instead of the Apostles’ Creed.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 34/1 (March 1991) 103 - 113. http://www.waynegrudem.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/he-did-not-descend-into-hell_JETS.pdf.

[53] Sproul, R.C. “What does the Apostles' Creed mean when it says that Jesus descended into hell?” Ligonier Ministries. https://www.ligonier.org/learn/qas/what-does-apostles-creed-mean-when-it-says-jesus-d. Taken from Sproul, R.C. Now, That’s a Good Question! Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers. 1996

[54] Vine, W.E. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. Volume 3. Waco: TX: Thomas Nelson, 1981. 201.

[55] Willard, Dallas. “Live Life to the Full.” Christian Herald UK. April 14, 2001. https://dwillard.org/articles/live-life-to-the-full.

[56] Scofield, C.I. Scofield Reference Bible. 1917. 999 - 1000. “The Sermon on the Mount has application…literally to the kingdom. In this sense it gives the divine constitution for the righteous government of the earth. Whenever the kingdom of heaven is established on earth it will be according to that constitution.”  James F. Rand allowed that because Jesus referred to his disciples being persecuted, a feature incongruous with geopolitical supremacy, that the Sermon on the Mount must become relevant for followers of Jesus right before the “tribulation period.” See Rand, James F. “Problems in Literal Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.” Bibliotheca Sacra 112 (January 1955): 28-39; 112 (April 1955): 125-137. Rand argues, “If it is admitted that the sermon contains requirements for entrance into the kingdom, then it must also be conceded that the teachings of the sermon will be in effect not only during the kingdom age but also at a period immediately preceding. A number of reasons indicate that this period will be that which is known as the great tribulation period.”  William L. Pettingill, pastor of First Baptist Church in New York City, who was named a “Bible Authority” by the New York Times in his obituary in 1960, said that Christians should not pray the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9 - 13 because Jesus meant it for a different dispensation.  See Pettingill, William L. Simple Studies in Matthew. 2013 Kindle edition. 77 - 79. “The Kingdom Prayer will have its proper and full use in a time yet future. After the coming of our Lord for His people and the catching-up of the Church, there will be a believing Remnant of Jewish disciples raised up, who will go everywhere preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, saying, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at, hand.” … The Jewish Remnant will be terribly persecuted under the awful reign of the Beast-King and the power of Satan (Rev 13).”

[57] Moo, Douglas. “The Law of Christ as the Fulfillment of the Law of Moses: A Modified Lutheran View.” Edited by Gundry, Stanley N. Five Views on Law and Gospel. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 1996.

[58] Bahnsen, Greg L. “The Theonomic Reformed Approach to Law and Gospel.” Edited by Gundry, Stanley N. Five Views on Law and Gospel. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 1996. The early Gallic Confession, or French Confession of Faith, was approved by John Calvin himself, probably with help from Theodore Beza and Pierre Viret, in 1553 for use by Reformed congregations in Paris and then all France.  “We believe that the ordinances of the law came to an end at the advent of Jesus Christ; but although the ceremonies are no more in use, yet their substance and truth remain in the person of him in whom they are fulfilled.  And, moreover, we must seek aid from the law and the prophets for the ruling of our lives, as well as for our confirmation in the promises of the gospel.” (Gallic Confession 23)  And: “We believe that God wishes to have the world governed by laws and magistrates, so that some restraint may be put upon its disordered appetites.  And as he has established kingdoms, republics, and all sorts of principalities, either hereditary or otherwise, and all that belongs to a just government, and wishes to be considered as their Author, so he has put the sword into the hands of magistrates to suppress crimes against the first as well as against the second table of the Commandments of God.  We must therefore, on his account, not only submit to them as superiors, but honor and hold them in all reverence as his lieutenants and officers,

whom he has commissioned to exercise a legitimate and holy authority.” (Gallic Confession 39)  Found in Schaff, Philip. The Creeds of Christendom. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1931 (6th edition). 356 - 382.  Available here:  https://web.archive.org/web/20180303005840/http://www.creeds.net/reformed/frconf.htm

[59] Hopfl, Harold. The Christian Polity of John Calvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 182 - 184.

[60] See Moo, Douglas. “The Law of Christ as the Fulfillment of the Law of Moses: A Modified Lutheran View.” Edited by Gundry, Stanley N. Five Views on Law and Gospel. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 1996.

[61] Calvin, John. On Usury.  Mark Valeri argues that Calvin was more flexible and kept the poor in mind.  See Valeri, Mark. “Calvin and the Social Order: Moral Ideals and Transatlantic Empire.” Edited by Davis, Thomas J. John Calvin’s American Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010.  I grant Valeri the historical point and charitable view.  However, Calvin’s teaching led to the Calvinist tradition accepting usury in principle, which eventually led to a predatory banking system.  Valeri notes that in Geneva, Calvin developed a public bank (24) but elsewhere endorsed private usury (24), which led to Puritans accepting usury at low levels but resisting “creditors with their inflated fees” (24), which led to Massachusetts Puritans accepting “minimal interest on loans to fellow colonists” (25), which led to New England Puritans “adjust[ing] their economic teachings” in the Atlantic economy, where they “deploy[ed] credit as a commodity, that is, as a means to profit in and of itself” (25 - 26), which led to Puritan “Preachers subtly shift[ing] the meaning of the sin of usury from any exchange of credit for a profit to mean-spirited lawsuits against impoverished debtors” (27), which led to “free floating prices and interest rates” (28), which led to the view “that the customary prohibitions against usury amounted to old Catholic superstitions long made anachronistic; that merchants who set their prices by the market merely followed the laws of providence; and that the host of new techniques for making a profit in the market, from using lawyers and factors to trading bonds and securities, were godly practices.” (28, italics mine).  As Valeri’s own words indicate, Calvin’s shift from the biblical condemnation of usury to accepting it, as well as his movement beyond public banking to unlimited, private usury for the sake of profit alone led to the predatory financial system we have today.  The popular mythology on the ground is that the market reflects “the laws of providence.”

[62] Wuthnow, Robert. Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1989. 52 - 156. In England: “Merchants and burgesses played a significant role in the Reformation Parliament’s religious actions.  Since they had benefited greatly from the crown’s efforts to promote trade, they may have been inclined to support its religious policies for this reason alone.  But there were also religious reasons for their actions.  At least several burgesses in Parliament were devout Protestants, and a number were familiar with Protestantism through commercial contacts with the Continent and through Lutheran preachers in the towns.  Some of the merchants’ economic grievances were also directed against the church.  Among these were sentiments that the church inhibited commerce through its own economic establishments, its foreign policy, and its attitudes towards usury; that church courts charged excessive fees; that the church failed to provide adequately fro the public welfare in London and other towns; and that the church’s monastic houses engaged in unfair economic practices which took business away from the merchants.” (p.79)  “Overall, each of the three major regions in which the Reformation proved successful - central Europe, northern Europe, and England - demonstrate the crucial importance of the state in initiating and defending the reforms… Popular acceptance of evangelical teachings, particularly in the towns, became transmuted into official doctrine in these areas largely under the sponsorship of regimes that could risk initiating such actions because they were relatively independent of control from the landowners.” (p.81 - 82)

[63] Weber, Max. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 177. Weber cites the saying, “only when the people were poor did they remain obedient to God,” but does not provide a reference in Calvin’s own works.  Nevertheless, Weber does cite Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, 158. Adams thought “that God probably allows so many people to remain poor because He knows that they would not be able to withstand the temptations that go with wealth.  For wealth all too often draws men away from religion.”

[64] Calvin, John. On God and Political Duty. Edited by McNeill, John T. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. 1950.

[65] Penley, Paul. “John Calvin Killed Rival Theologians: Bad Bible Interpretation Justified It.” Reenacting the Way. March 15, 2015. https://www.reenactingtheway.com/blog/john-calvin-had-people-killed-and-bad-bible-interpretation-justified-it. Quite possibly, Calvin arranged for slow-burning still-green wood to be used, which slowly baked Servetus to death, as this source seems to take for granted. But that particular detail is contested.

[66] Calvin, John. Letter to Guillaume Farel on 24 July 1555. “I am persuaded that it is not without the special will of God that, apart from any verdict of the judges, the criminals have endured protracted torment at the hands of the executioner.” Quoted by Armstrong, David. “John Calvin: Torment of an Inept Execution “Special Will of God”.” Biblical Evidence for Catholicism | Patheos. August 24, 2017.  https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2017/08/john-calvin-torment-inept-execution-special-will-god.html

[67] “The Minutes Book of the Geneva City Council, 1541-59.” Translated by Zweig, Stefan. Erasmus and the Right to Heresy. Condor Books. 1979.  Quoted by Penley, Paul. “John Calvin Killed Rival Theologians: Bad Bible Interpretation Justified It.” Reenacting the Way. March 15, 2015. https://www.reenactingtheway.com/blog/john-calvin-had-people-killed-and-bad-bible-interpretation-justified-it

[68] Per 100,000 people, Switzerland 980; Scotland 509; Finland 355; Luxembourg 187; Norway 173; Germany 137; Hungary 132; down to Spain 23. See the very helpful per capita table provided by Erasmus. “Witch trials in the context of the Reformation.” The Economist. January 21, 2018. https://www.economist.com/erasmus/2018/01/21/witch-trials-in-the-context-of-the-reformation.  See the Witchcraft Acts in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In Scotland, the Presbyterian Scottish covenanters led by John Knox and James VI led to nationalistic religious purges: the five major Scottish witch trials between 1590 and 1662. In mostly Lutheran Finland, witch trials almost always resulted in acquittals, and most convictions resulted in fines. 

[69] Reformed theonomists Gary North and James Jordan, disciples of R.J. Rushdoony, say as a matter of course, apparently without questioning it, “The State of Israel is Jewish, to be sure, even to the point of imposing a jail sentence on anyone who preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ to an Israeli.” See North, Gary and James B. Jordan. Healer of the Nations: Biblical Principles for International Relations. Forth Worth, TX: Dominion Press. 1987. 133. “Their nation then becomes officially Christian, in the same sense that the State of Israel is officially Jewish, Saudi Arabia is officially Muslim, and the Soviet Union is officially Communist.” (164). North and Jordan advocate for U.S. foreign aid given only for military purposes, and cite Israel’s Mossad as an example for the U.S. (228).

[70] Lewis, Donald M. A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021.  88 - 91.

[71] Ingersoll, Julie J. Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Smith, Chris. “His Truth is Marching On.” UC Berkeley Alumni Association. September 6, 2012. https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/fall-2012-politics-issue/his-truth-marching

[72] Augustine of Hippo. Confessions 1.19.

[73] John of Damascus. Against the Manicheans 94.1569, 1573.

[74] John Cassian. Conferences 13.12.

[75] Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Anchorage, AK: Saint Herman of Alaska Press. 2007. This is a very helpful historical overview of Augustine and his disciple Prosper of Aquitaine, and their critical and concerned reception by other Christian leaders especially in Gaul. A helpful online representation of what an actual dialogue might have been between John Cassian and Augustine of Hippo is shown by Eastern Orthodox lay theologian Benedict Seraphim and Protestant John Hendryx, founder of the website monergism.com. See Benedict Seraphim, “St. John Cassian: On Grace and Free Will.” This is Life! March 25, 2005. https://benedictseraphim.wordpress.com/2005/03/31/st-john-cassian-on-grace-and-free-will/.

[76] Wright, N.T. After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. New York, NY: HarperOne, 2010.

[77] Wilson, Bruce. “Nationally Prominent Mega-Pastor Hagee Claims Hitler Was a "Half-Breed Jew.” The Huffington Post. August 1, 2009. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nationally-prominent-evan_b_249279.

[78] Stein, Sam. “McCain Backer Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God's Will (AUDIO).” Huffington Post. May 29, 2008. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mccain-backer-hagee-said_n_102892.

[79] Wilson, Bruce. “Hagee, Hitler Pushed Almost Identical Anti-Jewish Banking Conspiracy Theories.” Talk to Action. June 16, 2008. http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/6/16/163859/055,

[80] Forde, Gerharde O. “The Lutheran View.” Edited by Alexander, Donald L. Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification.Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 1988. 15.

[81] James K.A. Smith said of his book, Desiring the Kingdom, that it was a “contemporary articulation from within the Reformed tradition.”  See Smith, James K.A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 2009. 15.  I appreciate the book deeply; Smith’s examination of what we do habitually, i.e. liturgies secular and sacred, and the scope of his observations and curiosity, constitute an insightful and valuable way to examine our humanity and interpret Christian liturgical practice.  However, as an approach to the heart, love, and desire, I believe Smith becomes a bit too narrow.  How our desires are shaped and transformed, and how we participate in God’s work in us, including through the stages of our bodily development, goes a bit underexplored, which is slightly disappointing in a work designed especially for Christian university educators working largely with 18 - 22 year olds, which is otherwise very engaging.

And, in a critical moment of constructive pastoral guidance about Christian liturgy, Smith rests on the survival emotions nurtured by penal substitution and the Reformed tradition.  He says, for example, that the reading of the Law serves to check our autonomy, and that “Christian worship runs counter to the formation of secular liturgies that either tend to nullify talk of guilt and responsibility or tend to point out failures without extending assurance of pardon” (p.180).  Smith’s Reformed anthropology shows here when he gently suggests that the foremost desire we have and need from Christian liturgy is to hear legal matters:  authoritative law and “assurance of pardon” from God. 

In simple terms, I believe people do not always need to hear about the divine pardon.  When you know your Doctor is good and loves you, then just hearing Jesus’ commands and call can be enough.  God’s commandments certainly can check our autonomy and does, but they can also function like a doctor’s health regimen.  As the apostle Paul explained his experience under the Law of Moses as Saul of Tarsus in Romans 7, hearing the commands of God produced in him the feelings of increased desire for God, but disappointment and disgust with himself, which was then clarified as not “the self,” but “sin which indwells me.”  Emotionally, then, God’s commandments can clarify what the sickness is and how it works, explain healthy relationships, confirm us in our choices and convictions, help us admire Jesus for fulfilling the commandments and becoming the cure on our behalf, vindicate the definitions of goodness and beauty and truth which will emerge triumphant in Christ, and beckon us to participation and hope. 

In other words, present in Smith’s presentation is the Calvinist dialectic of adversary vs. friend, which can confuse people’s motivations (so why do I need to obey, again?) and extends back to Calvin’s theological statement, “God hated us while He loved us.”  In the Hebraic wisdom posture and patristic Christian medical and restorative paradigm, it is more accurate to say that God loves us and therefore hates the sin-sickness in us, which is why He calls us to partner with Him and participate in His victory over it, in Jesus. 

[82] Wright, N.T. The New Testament and the People of God. Grand Rapids, MI: Fortress Press. 1992. 88. When post-WWII biblical scholars revisited the subject of Judaism to consider the role of theology and church in the Holocaust, E.P. Sanders recognized that Jewish self-understanding begins with divine election and did not promote the earning or meriting of God’s acceptance.  This launched a resurgence of interest in the perception of Judaism by the New Testament and subsequently, Christians.  Much for the better.

[83] Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2013. 164 – 174. “For Augustine, by contrast, the sheer size of the inner world, was a source of anxiety quite as much as of strength. ‘There is, indeed, some light in men: but let them walk fast, walk fast, lest the shadows come.’ The conscious mind was ringed with shadows. Augustine felt he moved in a ‘limitless forest, full of unexpected dangers.’ [...] ‘This memory of mine is a great force, a vertiginous memory, my God, a hidden depth of infinite complexity: and this is my soul, and this is what I am. What, then, am I, my God? What is my true nature? A living thing, taking innumerable forms, quite limitless...’ ‘As for the allurement of sweet smells’ for instance, ‘I am not much troubled... At least, so I seem to myself: perhaps I am deceived. For there is in me a lamentable darkness in which my latest possibilities are hidden from myself, so that my mind, questioning itself upon its own powers, feels that it cannot rightly trust its own report.”

[84] Vial, Theodore M. Modern Religion, Modern Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. 21 - 54.  See also Boxill, Bernard R. “Kantian Racism and Kantian Teleology.” Edited by Zack, Naomi. The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy and Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. 44 - 53. Abstract from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28299/chapter-abstract/214978094: “Appalled by Kant’s views on race, some Kantians suggest that these views are unrelated to his central moral teaching that every human being “exists as an end in itself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” But Kant developed his racial views because of his teleological view that we regard the history of the human species as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to establish an externally perfect state constitution as the necessary means to the end of developing all human predispositions. To evade the difficulty, Kantians may claim that Kant’s teleology and moral theory are not essentially related, but Kant thought that they were and close textual analysis supports their connection.”

[85] Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. 1793. 122.  See also discussion in Soulen, R. Kendall. The God of Israel and Christian Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. 1996. 66.

[86] Trevor-Roper, Hugh Redwald. From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution. Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press. 1992. 51. Dubnow, Simon. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times Until the Present Day. London: Forgotten Books. 2018 reprint. 44.

[87] Lukowski, Jerzy and Hubert Zawadzki. A Concise History of Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. “The new bishops, with their dioceses and synods, with their political and economic privileges, with their ties to Rome, came eventually to open a door to the differentiation and variegation of political authority, limiting the ruler’s monopoly on power.  Further east, the traditions of Orthodoxy and Byzantine caesaropapism were to direct the lands of Rus’ along a very different path of political development.” (p.9)

[88] England was aware that Roger Williams established Providence Plantation in 1636 and Anne Hutchinson and others established Portsmouth in 1638 with laws of freedom of religious conscience; King Charles II granted the Royal Charter of 1663 uniting these and two other neighboring settlements as the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  England’s Parliament passed the Maryland Toleration Act of 1649 granting Protestants and Catholics alike freedom of worship in the colony of Maryland, and the Toleration Act of 1688 following the Glorious Revolution, which gave freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters from the Church of England; the principle would be expanded later by the Unitarians Relief Act 1813, the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791, the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, and the Jews Relief Act 1858.

[89] Elior, Rachel. The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 1993.  Elior, Rachel. The Mystical Origins of Hasidism. Translated by Carmy, Shalom. Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 2006.

[90] Buber, Martin. Hasidism and Modern Man. Translated by Friedman, Maurice. New York, NY: Horizon Press. 1958.

[91] Maddox, Randy L. “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy: Influences, Convergences and Differences.” The Asbury Theological Journal. Volume 45. Number 2. 1990. https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1398&context=asburyjournal.

[92] Wesley, John. “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.” Edited by Jackson, Thomas. The Works of John Wesley. Volume 11. Number 29. 1872. http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/a-plain-account-of-christian-perfection/. “6. On January 1, 1733, I preached before the University in St. Mary's church, on ‘the Circumcision of the Heart;” an account of which I gave in these words: "It is that habitual disposition of soul which, in the sacred writings, is termed” holiness; and which directly implies, the being cleansed from sin ‘from all filthiness both of flesh and spirit;’ and, by consequence the being endued with those virtues which were in Christ Jesus the being so ‘renewed in the image of our mind,’ as to be ‘perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect."’

[93] Maddox, Randy L. “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy: Influences, Convergences and Differences.” The Asbury Theological Journal. Volume 45. Number 2. 1990. https://place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1398&context=asburyjournal. Maddox writes, “When we turn to Wesley, we find an intriguing blend of elements from Eastern and Western anthropology. To begin with, Wesley assumed the Western view that humanity was originally in a state of complete perfection. Indeed, he argued [wrongly] that this had been the universal Christian position. And yet, Wesley scholars have also discerned a deep-seated conviction in Wesley that humans are beings “in process,” and that God does not implant holiness in us instantaneously. The latter conviction is clearly present in Wesley, but relates to growth in godliness and holiness after the Fall. He frequently stressed that such growth is gradual and lifelong, even if there are important instantaneous changes as part of it. He even suggested that growth in grace will continue through all eternity. Importantly, he drew on Eastern sources to warrant this stress on gradual growth.” (p.34 - 35)

“Like his anthropology, Wesley's Christology contains a mixture of Western and Eastern elements. Clearly, the dominant motif in both his and Charles's understanding of the Atonement is that of satisfying divine justice. However, hints of a "recapitulation" model, with its emphasis that Christ became human so that we might be delivered from corruption and sin and restored to God-likeness, can be found in their work. Indeed, there is some attempt to fuse the two understandings.

Likewise, while it is clear that the death of Christ has central importance to Wesley, he gave more emphasis to the resurrected Christ as lord and king than was typical of eighteenth-century Western theology. Finally, the recognition of Eastern influences on Wesley's Christology may help explain his similar emphasis on the divine nature of Christ, almost to the absorption of the human nature.” (p.36)

[94] Wesley, John. Thoughts Upon Slavery. 1774. https://www.newroombristol.org.uk/product/thoughts-upon-slavery/.

[95] Lawrence, William B. “Slavery and the Founders of Methodism.” United Methodist News. August 13, 2020. https://www.umnews.org/en/news/slavery-and-the-founders-of-methodism.

[96] Sutton, William R. Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. 1998. Wood, Darren Cushman. Blue Collar Jesus: How Christianity Supports Workers’ Rights. Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press. 2004. 57 - 58.

[97] Wood, Darren Cushman. Blue Collar Jesus: How Christianity Supports Workers’ Rights. Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press. 2004. 77, 91 - 99.

[98] Including in many labor efforts.  Luker, Ralph E. “The Social Gospel and the Failure of Racial Reform, 1877–1898.” Church History.  Volume 46. Issue 1. March 1977. p.80 - 99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3165160.

[99] Little, Lawrence S. Disciples of Liberty: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Age of Imperialism, 1884-1916. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. 2000.  Hogue, William. “Black Social Gospel, Radical Politics, and Internationalism.” African American Intellectual History Society | Black Perspectives. February 22, 2022. https://www.aaihs.org/black-social-gospel-radical-politics-and-internationalism/#fn-301509-1.  

[100] Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Smith, Ronald Gregor. Edinburgh: T&T Clark Press. 1937.

[101] Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets. New York, NY: Harper and Row. 1962.  See also Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York, NY: Harper and Row. 1955.

[102] Gavrilyuk, Paul. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.

[103] British theologian Timothy Gorringe, after carefully examining church history from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries to observe the deeply interwoven personal and historical interactions between atonement theology and criminal justice paradigms, says succinctly, “Wherever Calvinism spread, punitive sentencing follows.”  Gorringe, Timothy. God's Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. 140.

[104] Calvin, John. Commentary on Genesis. Volume 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library | Baker. 1996. 223. “It is therefore true, that they departed with the design of coming to the land of Canaan; because, having received the promise concerning a land which was to be shown them, they suffered themselves to be governed by God, until he should actually bestow what he had promised. Nevertheless it may be, that God, having proved the devotedness of Abram, soon afterwards removed all doubt from his mind. For we do not know at what precise moment of time, God would intimate to him what it was his will to conceal only for a season. It is enough that Abram declared himself to be truly obedient to God, when, having cast all his care on God’s providence, and having discharged, as it were, into His bosom, whatever might have impeded him, he did not hesitate to leave his own country, uncertain where, at length, he might plant his foot; for, by this method, the wisdom of the flesh was reduced to order, and all his affections, at the same time, were subdued.”

[105] Ibid 227 - 228.

[106] Ibid 261. Italics mine.

[107] Ibid 262.

[108] Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book 2. Chapter 11. 491. See also 80 - 92.

[109] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Kaufmann, Walter and R.J. Hollingdale. New York, NY: Vintage Books. 1989. Note: Nietzsche’s first edition was published in 1887.

[110] Childs, Brevard S. Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992. 3 - 10.

[111] Levenson, Alan T. “Was the Documentary Hypothesis Tainted by Wellhausen’s Antisemitism?” Torah.com. Date unknown. https://www.thetorah.com/article/was-the-documentary-hypothesis-tainted-by-wellhausens-antisemitism

[112] Lewis, Donald M. A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021. 92 - 361.